The expansion of telehealth services for opioid use disorder treatment during the pandemic made treatment more accessible and lowered the likelihood of overdose, a study published Aug. 31 in JAMA Psychiatry found.
The National Institutes of Health and other federal researchers compared telehealth use, treatment engagement and overdoses among 175 ,778 Medicare beneficiaries being treated for opioid use disorder in two groups: one group from September 2018 to February 2020, before the pandemic, the other from September 2019 to February 2021.
The researchers found that 12.1 percent of beneficiaries in the pandemic group were treated for opioid use disorder via telehealth, compared with .01 percent of the pre-pandemic group. In the pandemic group, 18.4 percent received medical treatment for an overdose compared to 18.5 percent of the pre-pandemic group.
"The expansion of telehealth services for people with substance use disorders during the pandemic has helped to address barriers to accessing medical care for addiction throughout the country that have long existed," Wilson Compton, MD, deputy director of National Institutes of Health’s National Institutes on Drug Abuse, said in the report.