Payers and providers play an important role in addressing the opioid crisis in our communities. This page highlights the most recently added resources specifically targeting healthcare providers, healthcare system employees, and individuals who manage private and public insurance plans. These resources, identified with blue tiles, include patient and provider education materials, clinical practice guidelines and practice protocols, and research and reports about insurance coverage and benefit design around addiction treatment and pain management.
If you’d like to submit materials for inclusion consideration or suggest a future featured topic, please visit CLOUD’s call for submissions page.
The state of Massachusetts passed legislation in 2018 requiring acute care hospitals to develop programs to initiate medication assisted treatment (MAT) for patients with opioid use disorder (OUD) seen in the emergency department. These guidelines, developed by the Massachusetts Hospital Association and state College of Emergency Physicians, offer clinical and operational recommendations for hospitals when implementing this state policy.
This 2018 report from the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review compared the evidence for effectiveness and value of new extended-release medications for opioid use disorder (two buprenorphine injections, one buprenorphine implant, and naltrexone injection).
This article describes the case of an individual prescribed buprenorphine for opioid use disorder (OUD) who did not achieve treatment stability at the maximum dose allowed by the patient’s insurer of 24 mg daily.
A 2016 report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, this report describes 12 models of care for providing medication assisted treatment (MAT) for opioid use disorder in primary care settings.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has compiled this guide to tools and resources available to help create or expand medication assisted treatment (MAT) for opioid use disorder (OUD), particularly in rural areas. The tools are grouped into four categories: tools for prevention of OUD, tools to assist in training or educating individuals about MAT, tools for implementing MAT programs in office-based settings, and tools for preventing or responding to opioid overdose.
The Association for Community Affiliated Plans, which represents insurers that work with low income and vulnerable individuals, prepared this report on strategies health plans can adopt to increase the number of primary care providers willing to prescribe medications to treat opioid use disorder.
This report provides an overview of the evidence of effectiveness for multi-modal pain treatment programs with the goal of determining key elements of effective treatment programs.
A 2017 white paper from the Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine and Health, section one of this report reviews the current status of medical pain management and the nature of the pain crisis in America.
The ALTO program, or alternatives to opioids, is a comprehensive program focused on providing non-opioid treatments for some common conditions treated in hospital emergency departments. These presentation slides provide guidance to providers or administrators who may want to start an ALTO program in their emergency department.
This resource serves as a visual presentation for use with patients when talking about pain, this resource shows that pain is not necessarily connected to physical injury or disease.