Thank you to the Emergency Medicine News team for highlighting the MATTERS program and its impact on individuals experiencing opioid use disorder.
Read an excerpt from the article on this page and click on the button below to contact the MATTERS team.
Inventive Program Gets Patients with OUD to Treatment in a Week or Less—from the ED
July 2022
By: Joshua Lynch DO, Lucy Connery MPH, Caleigh Loughran
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, after declaring the opioid crisis a public health emergency in 2017, released a five-point strategy to prioritize improving access to prevention, treatment, and recovery supports. The plan also targeted overdose-reversing drug availability and distribution, strengthening health data reporting, supporting innovative research, and advancing pain management practices.
The University at Buffalo Department of Emergency Medicine and UB|MD Emergency Medicine had set out a year earlier to decrease opioid prescribing in their emergency departments. Guidelines were established for patients and prescribers for appropriate opioid prescribing, which were endorsed by every major health system and urgent care organization in Western New York to ensure consistency across the region. The EDs of the major academic health centers in Buffalo subsequently saw a greater than 50 percent decline in opioid prescribing from 2015 to 2018.
The program started when one of us (JL), with the support of UB|MD EM, developed Medications for Addiction Treatment and Electronic Referrals (MATTERS), a public health model for prevention and treatment. It began with an aggressive effort to train emergency physicians and advanced practice providers in responsible opioid prescribing, emergency department-initiated buprenorphine treatment, and rapid referrals to outpatient treatment.
Participating EDs and treatment organizations agreed to a common set of values to ensure consistency of the treatment approach across the network. Patients initially were referred from a hospital to one of three clinics to ensure proof of concept. Proving success in the Greater Buffalo area, the MATTERS Network expanded across New York State in partnership with regional health systems, county health departments, and the New York State Department of Health.
