Abstract  Process and quality improvement techniques have been successfully applied in health care arenas, but efforts to institute
these strategies in alcohol and drug treatment are underdeveloped. The Network for the Improvement of Addiction Treatment
(NIATx) teaches participating substance abuse treatment agencies to use process improvement strategies to increase client
access to, and retention in, treatment. NIATx recommends five principles to promote organizational change: (1) understand
and involve the customer, (2) fix key problems, (3) pick a powerful change leader, (4) get ideas from outside the organization,
and (5) use rapid cycle testing. Using case studies, supplemented with cross-agency analyses of interview data, this paper
profiles participating NIATx treatm...

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