Substance Use Disorders and Health Management

Dear Colleagues,

Substance use disorder (SUD) is a major driver of preventable morbidity and mortality and a growing challenge for health systems. Across emergency departments, hospitals, primary care, and community settings, organizations are increasingly responsible for delivering evidence-based SUD services while navigating fragmented healthcare reimbursement, variable regulations, and uneven clinical capacity. These system conditions influence access, care continuity, treatment quality, and patient outcomes including stigma.

As the literature suggests, strong heterogeneity exists in how health systems design, implement, and evaluate SUD services. This variation is often shaped by policy context such as Medicaid design and eligibility changes, behavioral health carve-outs, reimbursement rules for medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD) and counseling, telehealth flexibilities, and parity implementation. While policy variation can enable local innovation, it also creates uneven access and inconsistent standards of care across jurisdictions and payer environments. Healthcare organizations face conflicting incentives, reimbursement, and incomplete guidance when deciding what to implement for SUD services. This may impact service delivery, how to finance service delivery, and how to measure performance, limiting comparability and slowing cumulative learning.

We are pleased to invite you to provide empirical studies, implementation and quality improvement reports, and state-of-the-art reviews that identify actionable healthcare management and policy levers for scalable SUD care. We welcome submissions on integrated care, equity-focused delivery, data/analytics, telehealth, policy and cross-sector partnerships, healthcare service financing and sustainability, healthcare workforce and leadership that improve real-world outcomes.

This Special Issue aims to publish original research and reviews on how healthcare management and policy contexts shape the implementation and evaluation of evidence-based substance use disorder (SUD) services across care settings. Submissions may include implementation and quality improvement studies, health services and outcomes research, organizational and workforce analyses, and policy evaluations examining state variation (e.g., parity implementation, telehealth/prescribing rules, and PDMP requirements), financial impact on health services or patients. We welcome narrative and systematic reviews, scoping reviews, and meta-analyses that synthesize management and policy levers linked to access, retention, equity, and real-world SUD outcomes.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Systematic reviews/meta-analyses on management and policy levers in SUD care.
• Implementation and QI studies of evidence-based SUD models (e.g., MOUD, integrated care).
• SUD outcomes studies of organizational factors for healthcare organizations (workforce, leadership, readiness).
• Healthcare financing and payment analyses for care models (e.g., Medicaid/1115 waivers, parity, value-based care).
• Legal epidemiological policy comparisons across states/payers (telehealth/prescribing rules, PDMPs, etc.).

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. James R. Langabeer
Guest Editor

Dr. Francine R. Vega
Guest Editor Assistant

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Healthcare is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• substance use disorder (SUD)
• healthcare management
• health policy
• medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD)
• integrated care
• implementation science
• quality improvement
• Medicaid
• telehealth