Impact of a computer-assisted Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment on reducing alcohol consumption among patients with hazardous drinking disorder in hospital emergency departments. The randomized BREVALCO trial.

Objective: To assess the impact of a computer-assisted Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) on daily consumption of alcohol by patients with hazardous drinking disorder detected after systematic screening during their admission to an emergency department (ED).

Design: Two-arm, parallel group, multicentre, randomized controlled trial with a centralised computer-generated randomization procedure.

Setting: Four EDs in university hospitals located in the Paris area in France.

Participants: Patients admitted in the ED for any reason, with hazardous drinking disorder detected after systematic screening (i.e., Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test score ≥5 for women and 8 for men OR self-reported alcohol consumption by week ≥7 drinks for women and 14 for men).

Interventions: The experimental intervention was computer-assisted SBIRT and the comparator was a placebo-controlled intervention (i.e., a computer-assisted education program on nutrition). Interventions were administered in the ED and followed by phone reinforcements at 1 and 3 months.

Main Outcome Measure: The primary outcome was the mean number of alcohol drinks per day in the previous week, at 12 months. Results From May 2005 to February 2011, 286 patients were randomized to the computer-assisted SBIRT and 286 to the comparator intervention. The two groups did not differ in the primary outcome, with an adjusted mean difference of 0.12 (95% confidence interval, -0.88 to 1.11).

Conclusions: There was no additional benefit of the computer-assisted alcohol SBIRT as compared with the computer-assisted education program on nutrition among patients with hazardous drinking disorder detected by systematic screening during their admission to an ED.