Thank you to Dr. Allison Brashear and the UB Medicine podcast for inviting Dr. Joshua Lynch and Dr. Brian Clemency to discuss the MATTERS program!
Click Here to Visit the UB Medicine Podcast Page
Episode 12: Addiction and Emergency Medicine: Innovation, Access and Changing the Standard of Care.
The MATTERS program was founded by emergency medicine physician Dr. Joshua Lynch in partnership with UBMD Emergency Medicine in 2016 as a way to address the opioid overdose crisis in Western New York. Dr. Lynch saw the inadequacies in our health care system when it came to treating people with addiction, particularly in the emergency department (ED). People regularly returned to the ED for acute opioid withdrawal or after an overdose, but would reach a dead end when it came to follow-up care. MATTERS was created to effectively link people to medication for addiction treatment (MAT) and other community-based recovery resources. Since its inception, the program has facilitated over 7,500 referrals to outpatient treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD), spanning across New York State, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and Camden County, New Jersey.
MATTERS partners with EDs and other community-based organizations to facilitate referrals to treatment with a focus on rapid access to buprenorphine, an FDA-approved medication to treat OUD. In addition to linking people to MAT, the program also helps support people who use drugs (PWUD) to do so more safely through its harm reduction supply distribution program. Providing test strips to PWUD is an important overdose prevention strategy, as the drug supply is unpredictable in the United States. When Dr. Brashear asks the MATTERS leadership team to speak on the changing dynamics of the drug supply, Dr. Lynch replies, “We’ve seen patients that come in that are routine cocaine users, presenting with symptoms they don’t understand, and it turns out they were experiencing opiate withdrawal symptoms. They had inadvertent exposure to opioids through their cocaine via fentanyl contamination…Now they have a cocaine dependence and an opiate use disorder that needs to be addressed.”
Joshua Lynch, DO, FACEP
Founder, Chief Medical Officer
Brian Clemency, DO, MBA
Medical Director of Research