Hospitals Could Do More for Survivors of Opioid Overdoses

August 22, 2017

In an interview with Andrea Hsu of NPR, Dr. Donohue, senior author on a recent publication in JAMA, discussed their research findings regarding opportunities on the part of health care systems to intervene on behalf of overdose patients. Using Medicaid data from 2008-2013, researchers compared prescription opioid use and medication-assisted treatment rates before and after overdoses to determine if there was a significant change following the event. Unfortunately they found that prescriptions fell by only 3.5% while medication-assisted treatments increased by only 3.6%. This highlights an opportunity for improvement and a change in how patients with addiction are treated following an overdose.