Opioids, Opioid Use Disorder, & Overdose Prevention

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has recently developed guidelines for establishing a comprehensive crisis response system for behavioral health. Per these guidelines, a comprehensive system should provide individuals in crisis with “someone to call,” “someone to respond,” and “a place to go” to receive crisis response services.

Recovery support services (RSS) are non-clinical services that assist individuals and families in attaining and sustaining recovery from substance use disorders.

People with co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders (SUDs) benefit from integrated treatment to address both disorders concurrently. For several decades, policymakers and behavioral health systems have worked to overcome the historical separation between mental health and SUD treatment to improve care for people with co-occurring disorders.

Health Information Technology (HIT) was identified as a critical component of the HHS Roadmap for Behavioral Health Integration. To support the implementation of the Roadmap, an ASPE study was conducted to provide an overview of HIT adoption and utilization among behavioral health providers.

Insufficient access to behavioral health (BH) care and the inability to get timely care are significant problems in the United States. Concerns about BH network adequacy have been prompted by evidence of narrow networks for BH, variation in network adequacy across plans, and evidence that network adequacy impacts access to certain specialties.

This study of national retail pharmacy data from 2013 to 2022, found an overall increase in buprenorphine dispensed to women of reproductive age and a marked increase in fills that were prescribed by nurse practitioners/physician assistants.

This study represents findings from a descriptive analysis of a linked mother-child Medicaid claims dataset to examine the characteristics of pregnant women who use medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD) or intensive behavioral health treatment; additional analysis describes the mental health and neurodevelopment outcomes of their children at one year and three years.

A 2020 study examined the feasibility of using substance use disorder (SUD) patient intake assessment data as source of information for treatment planning.

Increasing availability of linked child welfare and Medicaid data can advance research on the intersections of child welfare and Medicaid. The project, Child and Caregiver Outcomes Using Linked Data (CCOULD), developed a research-use dataset combining child welfare records and Medicaid claims for children and families involved in child welfare systems in Florida and Kentucky.

This brief describes progress in the Child Welfare and Health Infrastructure for Linking and Data Analysis of Resources, Effectiveness, and Needs (CHILDREN) Initiative, which is entering its second year. At this time, four jurisdictions have been selected for participation in the CHILDREN Initiative and are engaging in feasibility studies to determine readiness for linking data.