SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – A multidisciplinary clinic has been seeing success in helping people in the Bay Area battle liver disease and substance use disorders.
The clinic is UCSF Health’s Healing Alcohol-Associated Liver Disease Together – better known as HALT.
“It’s also an acronym used in the addiction community for triggers for different behaviors,” Dr. Courtney Sherman, a hepatologist and co-founder of the HALT Clinic at UCSF, told KCBS’ Bret Burkhart in this week’s episode of As Prescribed.
When you are in a moment facing a trigger, take a moment to stop – or ‘HALT’ – and see if you are hungry, angry, lonely or tired instead.
The program launched in 2023 using a variety of resources to work together to help patients see improved liver health by tackling many of the issues causing substance use disorders.
“Together means me as a hepatologist, the patient, their families if they are involved and also mental health providers. We have an addiction counselor and an addiction medicine physician,” the doctor explained.
This type of multi-directional care has seen success in other environments.
“One of those examples is with liver cancer,” Dr. Sherman explained. “We have patients come in and see a hepatologist, an oncologist, interventional radiologist, and a surgeon. We know that when patients have this multidisciplinary care, their outcomes are better.”
On the alcohol side of things, the hepatologist said the inspiration came from the University of Michigan.
“They developed this multidisciplinary clinic several years ago and it was started by a hepatologist and a psychiatrist,” she stated.
They saw better outcomes with patients who went through the program compared to previous treatment plans.
“Meaning that they had fewer hospital utilization. So less emergency room visits and less hospitalizations,” Dr. Sherman said. “That has subsequently been shown at the Cleveland Clinic where they had a similar clinic that was developed – similar to HALT and similar to the program at University of Michigan Health – where they also showed improvements in liver disease metrics, improvements in a person’s functional status and performance status, reduction in alcohol use and reductions in severity of alcohol use disorder.”
It is still too soon to know how UCSF’s HALT clinic is performing in the metrics, but Dr. Sherman said she has seen significant anecdotal improvements with her patients.
She added that those improvements were not limited to the medical side of things, but also to the patients’ interpersonal relationships with others.
Listen to this week's "As Prescribed" to learn more.