Study reveals weak evidence for hospital interventions connecting AUD patients to outpatient care

Each year, hundreds of thousands of Americans pass through hospital doors with alcohol-related illness, are stabilized, and return to the same conditions that brought them there — a cycle that claims nearly 180,000 lives annually. Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz and Yale University have now examined whether hospitals can interrupt this pattern, reviewing 17 studies and 21 interventions designed to connect patients with alcohol use disorder to ongoing outpatient care after discharge. Their finding, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, is itself a kind of reckoning: d