A Buprenorphine Retention Report to Measure Opioid Use Disorder Care Metrics and Guide Outreach.

BACKGROUND

As opioid overdose rates remain high, systems-level tools are needed to monitor and improve the quality of care for opioid use disorder treatment. Although retention in care is a commonly used metric, the concept is variably defined in the literature, and clinics may not have real-time access to their own retention data.

METHODS

We designed a Structured Query Language (SQL)-based reporting tool to provide real-time and summative metrics related to buprenorphine retention. A retrospective observational design is used to characterize the summative metrics for an urban network of community health centers.

RESULTS

Among 569 patients started on buprenorphine between June 2020 and June 2022, by June 2023, 17% of patients remained actively engaged, 3% recently engaged, and 80% disengaged. Of those who disengaged, 55.4% did so after 3 or less prescriptions. The median duration of care was 5.3 months for all patients and 26.8 months for the 97 actively engaged patients. The median percentage of days covered by a buprenorphine prescription was 77.2% for actively engaged patients.

CONCLUSION

Implementation of the SQL report has given the clinic network access to real-time, nuanced buprenorphine retention data and has guided targeted patient outreach.