Towards Making “Warm Handoff” Pathways to Treatment the Default Option for Patients with Opioid Use Disorder Presenting in The Emergency Departments

This is a Core Research Project of the Penn Injury Science Center’s Injury Control Research Center (R49) funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The project aims to improve the treatment of opioid use disorder (OUD) by developing, refining, implementing, and evaluating a bundled orderset in the electronic health record (EHR) for streamlined assessment, treatment, and referral of patients with OUD that present to the emergency department (ED).

The ultimate goal is to make it easier for ED clinicians to initiate treatment for opioid use disorder in patients that present to the emergency department, so we do not miss an opportunity to help patients.

This research first assessed barriers and facilitators to initiating treatment for opioid use disorder in the ED, then tested multiple strategies to improve treatment initiation. With the findings from these first two studies, the researchers then redesigned how screening and treatment for opioid use disorder was handled in the ED and the electronic medical record.

This resulted in an increase in screening for OUD and in prescriptions for live-saving medications, like buprenorphine (which helps people not use other opioids) and naloxone (which reverses an opioid overdose).

This work is led by Drs. Maggie Lowenstein and Kit Delgado, as well as Co-Investigators Drs. Zack Meisel, Jeanmarie Perrone, and Kyle Kampman.