Overdoses due to non-medical use of prescription opioids and other opiates have become the leading cause of accidental deaths in the United States. Buprenorphine and extended-release naltrexone are key evidence-based interventions available to addiction treatment providers to treat opioid use disorder (OUD) and prevent overdose deaths. However, organizations' efforts to provide these pharmacotherapies have been hindered by limited success in recruiting providers (physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants) to prescribe the medications. The addiction field has not historically attracted physicians and limits on access are compounded by buprenorphine's unique regulatory situation, in which physicians and other prescribers must apply for a waiver that allows them buprenorphine prescribing slots to treat 30 patients in the first year and 100 in the following years.
This study will address this emerging need to increase access to buprenorphine and extended-release naltrexone by testing a bundle of practices, called the Prescriber Recruitment Bundle (PRB), which aims to recruit prescribers licensed to prescribe buprenorphine to work with addiction treatment organizations. The PRB consists of the following elements, a) candidate identification strategies, b) prescriber education forums, c) prescriber-friendly workflow and risk-reduction strategies, d) academic detailing to recruit OUD prescribers, e) telemedicine to provide access to OUD pharmacotherapies, and f) organizational leadership and culture to support building OUD pharmacotherapy capacity.
In this cluster randomized controlled trial, the primary research question is to test the impact of the PRB implemented in conjunction with the NIATx organizational change model, relative to the control, on increasing the number of buprenorphine treatment slots and extended-release naltrexone capacity and increasing the number of patients receiving buprenorphine and extended-release naltrexone in the participating addiction treatment organizations. The secondary research question is to test if the PRB affects factors likely to be associated with prescriber recruitment, including: resources dedicated to prescriber recruitment, prescriber recruiter motivation, and current employed physician satisfaction. Lastly, qualitative methods will be used to study the context and processes that influence PRB adoption and fidelity and to understand and develop a deeper understanding of how the PRB influences recruitment beyond the existing study variables.
