A Digital Smoking Cessation Intervention for Adults With Substance Use Disorder

Adults with substance use disorder (SUD) tend to have started smoking at a younger age and are more likely to be heavy smokers. Due to the many conflicting priorities in this population, smoking cessation is often relegated and ignored by both patients and their healthcare providers. As of 2008, only 2 out of 5 addiction treatment providers in the US offered behavioral treatment for smoking cessation, and less than 1 in 5 offered pharmacotherapy. However, many researchers have found that smoking cessation has positive effects on abstinence from other drugs, as smoking appears to increase craving for and the likelihood of using drugs. Contingency Management is a highly-effective, evidence based methodology demonstrated to be effective at reducing the use of all types of substances in over 100 randomized controlled trials and 7 meta-analyses. BrightView, an outpatient substance abuse treatment center with several locations across the state of Ohio, has partnered with DynamiCare Health to implement DynamiCare's innovative digital Contingency Management (CM) platform among BrightView's outpatient population of primarily low-income substance use disorder patients with comorbid nicotine dependence/tobacco use disorder. DynamiCare's platform automates Contingency Management to support smoking cessation interventions via smartphone app. This app rewards participants for negative substance tests and appointment attendance (using GPS tracking) to incentivize abstinence and promote engagement in treatment. The goal of this study is to reduce tobacco disparities for low-income adult participants using DynamiCare's digital intervention, and to build a rapidly scalable, sustainable process that makes the field of smoking cessation more effective, accountable, and accessible.