Pilot Implementation of Measurement-Based Care in Community Opioid Treatment Programs

Lethal drug overdoses have now become a leading cause of accidental death in the United States. The gold standard, evidence-based intervention for opioid use disorder (OUD) is pharmacotherapy, but abstinence rates following pharmacotherapy are sub-optimal. In fact, less than 40% of clients with OUD achieve abstinence in the first six months of treatment, highlighting the critical need to supplement pharmacotherapy with evidence-based psychosocial interventions. Unfortunately, very few community opioid treatment programs (OTPs) offer psychosocial interventions due to high patient volume and the need to identify behavioral treatments that can be flexibly delivered. Measurement-based care (MBC), the systematic use of client self-report data to inform treatment, is an evidence-based intervention that is uniquely well suited to complement OUD pharmacotherapy. Given the high lethality of opioid misuse, MBC provides an opportunity to identify early warning signs for poor treatment progress and enables treatment providers to intervene. Additionally, MBC may serve as a minimal intervention/intervention structure to increase the effectiveness of OUD treatment. Such structures have been proposed for implementation in community settings in lieu of full package evidence-based interventions to enhance feasibility and reduce barriers. The pressing need for flexible psychosocial interventions to complement pharmacotherapy, paired with the extensive evidence in support of MBC, makes it crucial to understand ways to implement and evaluate MBC's effectiveness in OTPs. This study involves a pilot type I hybrid effectiveness-implementation study with four OTPs.

Study Aim and Hypotheses are:

Aim: Pilot MBC effectiveness-implementation trial in community OTPs. Four OTPs will participate in a pilot hybrid type 1 effectiveness-implementation trial in which an MBC assessment protocol will be integrated into each OTP's electronic medical record (EMR). The pilot trial will gather data on MBC's effectiveness (outcomes: patient attendance and opioid abstinence) and implementation (outcomes: provider MBC exposure and fidelity). The study hypotheses are that post MBC EMR integration, patients will attend more treatment appointments (H1) and have more negative opioid urine screens per month (H2) compared to pre-EMR integration patients. Provider MBC exposure and fidelity will also be positively associated with higher attendance and abstinence across all sites (H3).