The article, “An Assessment of the One-Month Effectiveness of Telehealth Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder Using the Brief Addiction Monitor,” has been published in SAj.
In this commentary, the authors state telehealth treatment with medication for opioid use disorder (teleMOUD) was made possible with regulations following the COVID-19 pandemic that permitted prescribing buprenorphine without an in-person visit. Their study evaluates the self-reported outcomes of patients treated by teleMOUD using the Brief Addiction Monitor (BAM), a 17-question tool that assesses drug use, cravings, physical and psychological health, and psychosocial factors to produce 3 subset scores: substance use, risk factors, and protective factors.
In the AUTHORS’ OWN WORDS, they relate the importance of their work:
“Prior studies evaluating the efficacy of teleMOUD are largely limited to descriptive articles and studies reporting rates of treatment retention. The results of these studies have so far been promising and suggest that teleMOUD is associated with significantly higher rates of retention. Recently, there has been an increase in data evaluating outcomes such as overdose among patients receiving teleMOUD; for example, in one study conducted among Medicare beneficiaries, patients treated in telehealth versus in-person visits had similar rates of medically treated overdose. However, a quantitative assessment of patient improvement with teleMOUD is missing, as is a description of outcomes on a broad variety of patients (ie, not just Medicare, Veterans Affairs, or commercially insured). As the federal government and states weigh permanent changes to permit teleMOUD, evidence to evaluate its efficacy may be helpful.
In this article, we evaluate a cohort of patients treated by a teleMOUD provider using the Brief Addiction Monitor (BAM). BAM is a tool used to systematically monitor patient progress during substance use disorder (SUD) treatment.”
“This study evaluating patient self-reported progress on the BAM instrument found significant improvement in all 3 subscales (substance usage, risk factors, and protective factors) about 1 month after commencing treatment with a single teleMOUD provider. Other recent studies have provided evidence that teleMOUD increases retention in treatment6 and improves outcomes13 but have not explored the mechanism underlying this improvement. Our results indicate that substance use drops substantially during the first month of treatment and overall risk factors decrease as well.”