Dr. Jeffrey Samet, professor and chief of general internal medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine and Boston Medical Center, and a professor of community health sciences at Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH), received the Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM) Quality and Practice Innovation Award on behalf of the Boston Medical Center (BMC) CARE programs at the SGIM annual meeting in Washington, DC, on April 22.

Dr. Samet founded the Clinical Addiction Research and Education (CARE) Unit in 1993 to educate health professionals, provide health care, and inform clinical and public health practice and policy around unhealthy substance use. CARE has been an innovator and national leader in integrating addiction treatment and behavioral health into primary care, prescriber training and clinical support to improve opioid safety, addiction consulting services, and overdose prevention and naloxone rescue kit distribution to high-risk patients and their friends and family.

CARE innovations have become national models of care, with the integrated Office-Based Addiction Treatment (OBAT) program dubbed the “Massachusetts model” of outpatient opioid addiction treatment by the federal Substance Abuse Mental Health and Services Administration.

“Great programs that truly help patients are a product of inspired clinicians who are willing to re-examine the way that care is delivered and improve upon it,” Dr. Samet says. “We have been so fortunate to have such committed nurses, doctors, and social workers who make the system improvements to enable better care delivery.”

The SGIM Quality and Practice Innovation Award recognizes general internists and their organizations for successfully developing and implementing innovative model systems of practice improvement in ambulatory and/or inpatient clinical practice.

To read more about the honor, go to:

http://www.bu.edu/sph/2017/04/22/professor-honored-by-society-of-general-internal-medicine/