One in Six Patients with Opioid Use Disorder Leaving the Hospital Before Completing Treatment, Potentially Due to Untreated Withdrawal Symptoms

From Penn Medicine News:

“The drugs that individuals are using have changed over the past decade, and how we treat them should change, too,” said senior author M. Kit Delgado, MD, MS, an associate professor of Emergency Medicine and Epidemiology, and director of the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit. “Health systems can expand the use of interventions that are already proven to treat withdrawal and reduce but not widely used, such as medications like buprenorphine and methadone.”

Thakrar and Delgado also suggest that hospitals could be incentivized to reduce discharges BMA and to support specialty services such as addiction consult services that have been proven to reduce BMA discharges and that can reduce the risks of future readmission or death.

Read more at Penn Medicine.