USA. Cambridge Health Alliance's Experience During COVID: Providing Care to Our OUD Patient Population

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit us in March 2020, providers at Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA) were confronted with a dilemma: how do we continue to help our patients with opioid use disorder (OUD) remain in recovery?

Across our health system, CHA provides the majority of our OUD care via group-based opioid treatment (GBOT). In this model, patients who struggle with OUD come together for an hour-long shared medical appointment, in which they provide support to each other, discuss a topic of interest or participate in psychotherapeutic activity, and they receive their Buprenorphine-naloxone (B/N) prescriptions.

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While CHA had been providing GBOT as a treatment approach for our OUD patients for many years, the pandemic abruptly put a stop to this delivery model. Patients who had benefited from the social support of the group were now expected to socially isolate themselves. How would they get the support they needed? And, how would they get their B/N prescriptions? How would we do urine drug tests on them?

When CHA as an entire health system converted to televisits (i.e., conducting our visits exclusively via phone or video), we decided to do the same with our OUD patients. (BASIS online, Cambridge Health Alliance / Harvard Medical School – Teaching Hospital, USA, 13.09.2021)

https://www.basisonline.org/2021/09/cha-covid-experience-oud-patient-population.html