<p>A better understanding of veterans who are incarcerated or otherwise involved with the criminal justice system can help identify promising interventions and improve support for formerly incarcerated veterans as they reintegrate into their communities.</p>
States that want to increase access to buprenorphine, a lifesaving medication used to treat opioid use disorder, should consider efforts to enhance professional education and clinician knowledge.
States that want to increase access to buprenorphine, a lifesaving medication used to treat opioid use disorder, should consider efforts to enhance professional education and clinician knowledge, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
The number of active prescriptions for the opioid disorder treatment drug buprenorphine remained constant during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the number of new prescriptions for the treatment was far below what would normally have been expected, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
E-Mail
Most prescriptions for the drug buprenorphine, used to treat opioid use disorder, are written by a small number of the health care providers, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
Published in the June 1 edition of the
Journal of the American Medical Association, the study found that half of all patient-months of buprenorphine treatment during 2016 and 2017 were prescribed by just 4.9% of the physicians and other providers who prescribed the drug during the period. These findings have important implications for efforts to increase buprenorphine access, said Dr. Bradley D. Stein, the study s lead author and a senior physician researcher at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. Our study suggests that targeted efforts to encourage more current prescribers to become high-volume prescribers, and encourage existing high-volume subscribers to safely and effectively treat even more patients, may be a potent way to increase buprenorphine treatment capacity.