Patient placement criteria and their relation to access to appropriate level of care and engagement in alcoholism treatment.

Patient placement criteria (PPC) facilitate treatment matching through detailed, standardized assessment of patients' needs. This process affords the alcoholism treatment field an opportunity to address issues that influence access to appropriate level of care by highlighting these issues during the assessment. The American Society of Addiction Medicine Patient Placement Criteria can integrate assessment of social and environmental, institutional and patient issues that affect access to appropriate care and treatment engagement. They can ultimately improve access through an iterative approach: developing a broad consensus on guidelines based on research evidence and expert clinical opinion, making criteria clear and easy to use both for assessment and for teaching purposes, addressing the needs of special populations, and testing and improving the validity of decision rules to achieve optimal access and treatment engagement. Early evidence suggests that PPC are promising but there is much about them that remains to be tested and improved.