Many State Medicaid Programs Still Require Prior Authorization for Buprenorphine Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder
The opioid epidemic has been an ongoing public health crisis in the United States, claiming countless lives and devastating communities. Buprenorphine, a highly effective medication for the treatment of opioid use disorders, holds the potential to save lives. However, a significant hurdle exists in the form of prior authorization requirements, which are associated with lower access to […]
Intern Spotlight: Valeria Arango, Benicio Beatty, Ameya Komaragiri, Carlos Ponce de Leon Mendez, and Ella Salim
During the peak hour of a July summer day, CHERISH colleagues and interns from Boston Medical Center logged onto Zoom while investigators and staff in New York City filled a conference room located on the Upper East Side at Weill Cornell Medicine. Three minutes past twelve, Caroline Savitsky, program manager in the Section of Infectious […]
Penn LDI & CHERISH Launch New Online Communications Training Course for Academic Researchers
The University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI), which since 2019 has been offering the Amplify[at] LDI in-person communications course to help academic researchers translate and disseminate their findings more widely, has developed and just launched a free, online course providing an introduction to the same topics. The new training resource is […]
Advancing Evidence-Based Substance Use Disorder Treatment Policies
If you want to reform state laws to require detox facilities to include medications like buprenorphine and methadone in their treatments, you should start by changing the “hearts and minds” of those who oppose it, Rebekah Gee, MD, MPH, MHSPR, told the January 14, 2022 Penn LDI/CHERISH Virtual Conference at the University of Pennsylvania. Keynoting a gathering organized […]
Patient Preferences Do Not Explain Racial Disparities in Opioid Prescribing
Why are Black patients less likely than white patients to be prescribed opioids for acute pain in the emergency department (ED)? While many theories have been put forward (ranging from racial differences in patients’ pain management preferences to providers’ false beliefs in biological differences between racial groups), the specific mechanisms underpinning these disparities are unclear. […]
Prescription Drug Monitoring Program Mandates Affect Use of Opioids to Treat Acute, Severe Pain
Prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMP) have been crucial tools to address unsafe opioid prescribing. High rates of prescribing stoked the flames of the opioid crisis in the early 2000s, but opioid prescriptions have steadily decreased over the past decade. Unfortunately, opioid-related deaths have continued to rise each year. Many states have enacted comprehensive mandates that all clinicians consult the PDMP […]
More X-Waivered Obstetrician-Gynecologists Needed to Address Opioid Epidemic
“X-the X Waiver” has been the slogan used by physicians and public health advocates fighting for greater access to buprenorphine, a medication proven to treat opioid use disorder (OUD) with higher effectiveness than many other treatments. Despite being safe, however, buprenorphine is tightly regulated, and to prescribe it, health care providers need a permit (the X-waiver) […]
Dissemination Science to Advance the Use of Simulation Modeling
COVID-19 has brought simulation modeling to the foreground of public discourse, as policy makers and stakeholders project the effects of different interventions to “flatten the curve.” Simulation models allow investigators to tinker with different conditions of the world to observe how they affect future outcomes; however, translating the models’ results to the public can be […]
CHERISH Awarded Five-year Center of Excellence Grant to Continue Substance Use Health Economics Research
The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) of the National Institutes of Health has awarded the Center for Health Economics of Treatment Interventions for Substance Use, HCV and HIV (CHERISH) a five-year grant to continue the Center’s activities as a national center of excellence. CHERISH was founded in 2015 as a multi-institutional center for health […]
Simulation Modeling Presents Opportunities To Support The Public Health Response To The Opioid Crisis In North America
Although there are several evidence-based cost-effective interventions for people with opioid use disorder (OUD), they are underutilized. Questions remain regarding intervention selection, and cost of service delivery. Simulation modeling offers an opportunity to support decision making to address the syndemic of opioid overdose, HIV, and hepatitis C (HCV). In an article recently published in the International Journal […]
CHERISH Workshop Addresses an ‘Unfortunate Reality’ of the Addiction Treatment Industry
Funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and established in 2015, CHERISH is a five year collaboration of researchers from the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI) of the University of Pennsylvania, Weill Cornell Medical College, Boston Medical Center, and the University of Miami. Their work is focused on studying the health economics […]
No Safe Dose for That First Opioid Prescription
LDI Senior Fellows Zack Meisel, Benjamin Sun, and colleagues have a striking and sobering chart in a recent Annals of Emergency Medicine article on initial opioid prescriptions in the emergency department. They tracked how many “opioid-naïve” patients (i.e., those without a record of opioid use in the previous year) had persistent or high-risk opioid prescription use in the subsequent […]
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