Development and validation of a brief instrument for routine outcome monitoring in opioid maintenance pharmacotherapy services: the brief treatment outcome measure (BTOM).

Aim: To develop a brief, multi-dimensional instrument for routine, on-going treatment outcome monitoring in alcohol and other drug (AOD) services in Australia and examine the underlying psychometric properties. This study focuses on opioid maintenance pharmacotherapy (OMP) services.

Design: Researcher-administered test-retest interviews and clinician administered interviews.

Setting: The test-retest interviews took place in two private and two public OMP clinics in Sydney, Australia. The clinician-administered interviews took place in 37 metropolitan, rural and prison OMP services in New South Wales, Australia.

Participants: One hundred and sixty current OMP clients for the test-retest interviews and 2004 clients commencing OMP treatment for the clinician-administered interviews.

Measures: Thirty-two items across the domains of dependence, blood-borne virus exposure risk, drug use, health/psychological functioning and social functioning.

Findings: The internal reliability of the brief treatment outcome measure (BTOM) is satisfactory. Retest reliabilities for the scales and drug use scores are good to excellent indicating their consistency with multiple measurements across time and different interviewers and concurrent validation of BTOM scales with analogous scales from similar instruments yielded acceptable agreement. Average completion times of the BTOM were 14.5 min, when administered in a research context and 21 min in a clinical context.

Conclusions: A brief, valid and reliable questionnaire has been developed for monitoring treatment outcome over the range of OMP services. The BTOM contains a core set of outcome measures, which can be easily adapted for integration into routine clinical practice across the range of AOD services.