Open Primary Care Clinic Doors to Practice Facilitation

Screening, counseling, and treating unhealthy alcohol use in primary care improves patient outcomes, yet these preventive services are often delivered inconsistently or ineffectively.In their article, Jonas and colleagues 1 report findings from the STUN study, which enrolled 21 primary care practices, each with fewer than 10 clinicians, into a 12-month practice facilitation intervention that created workflows and tailored tools to address unhealthy alcohol use.Screening with the recommended Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test-Consumption (AUDIT-C) increased substantially, rising from 17.4% of patients at baseline to 57.6% following practice facilitation.Counseling for patients identified with unhealthy alcohol use also improved.Initially no patients had documented counseling, but after practice facilitation, 32.3% of those screening positive received counseling.While ideally, all people with unhealthy use would receive counseling, this improvement