Polaris Health Directions Inc.POLARIS-CABIT (COMPUTER ASSISTED BRIEF INTERVENTION FOR TOBACCO)
Helping adults beat their tobacco addiction
Cigarette smoking is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control reports. Tobacco use in general kills more than five million people each year around the world. And it comes with a hefty price tag. In the United States, cigarette smoking costs $197 billion dollars a year in lost productivity and health care expenditures. Nearly 20 percent of adults living in the United States smoke, and of that group about 70 percent say they want to quit and another 40 percent try to quit each year.
But it isn't easy.
The CDC promotes brief clinical interventions, counseling and behavioral cessation therapies as effective tools for quitting. Unfortunately, health care providers do not routinely provide such counseling. The Polaris team sought a simple way to integrate tobacco intervention in most healthcare settings, and they began to design a product to meet that need. The resulting product—Polaris-CABIT—will be brief, convenient to use, inexpensive and requires little specialized training.
There are four components to Polaris-CABIT that will contribute to its efficacy and set it apart from other existing tobacco intervention products.
(1) The assessment is computerized, which reduces administrative burden and may elicit more valid responses than face-to-face interviews.
(2) Polaris-CABIT includes a video module to complement counseling efforts. Three stage-based videos will be available for patients who are either not interested in quitting, contemplating quitting or trying to quit. Videos are a valuable tool for disseminating information on the dangers of tobacco use, and for influencing a change in behavior.
(3) A counseling guide designed specifically for the individual patient serve as prompts for a provider based on the National Cancer Institute's "Five A's"--Ask, Advise, Assess, Assist and Arrange a follow-up. Following these steps has been shown to improve documentation, referral and completion of preventive health services such as tobacco counseling.
(4) The Polaris-CABIT system produces tailored, stage-based reports—moving away from the one-size-fits-all approach to many current tobacco interventions.
ADDITIONAL BENEFITS
The Polaris team designed Polaris-CABIT to appeal to a wide variety of health care settings, including hospitals, primary care clinics, Employee Assistance Programs and correctional facilities. As with other Polaris products, once completed and collecting data, Polaris-CABIT will contain predictive capabilities to help a clinician anticipate the amount and rate of improvement for a patient.
The patient assessment will include measures for demographic information, screens for tobacco use, feelings toward quitting (importance, commitment and readiness), depression screener, perceived health risk and smoking and quitting history, among others. The assessment will take 10 minutes or less.
Polaris-CABIT also administers an optional provider assessment. Items include expired carbon monoxide levels, adverse health impacts the physician suspects is related to the patient's smoking and a checklist for anticipated health improvements should the patient quit. This assessment takes no more than five minutes to complete.
Contact us at moreinfo@polarishealth.com to learn more about the benefits you will see by using Polaris-CABIT or for more information on the further development of the system.
We are committed to helping you succeed in improving your outcomes.
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