As states continue to grapple with the opioid epidemic, many share growing concerns relating to the increased usage of other drugs and their concurrent usage with opioid products; particularly benzodiazepines and methamphetamines. Despite the high prevalence of the concurrent usage of these products, very little research has been conducted regarding the impact of OUD treatment policy on concurrent use of or dependence on other substances and how this information could be used to inform broader SUD treatment policy at the state level.
With support from MACPAC, AcademyHealth’s Evidence-Informed State Health Policy Institute and the University of Pittsburgh are conducting a pilot project with four Medicaid Outcomes Distributed Research Network (MODRN) participating State-University Partnership Learning Network (SUPLN) partnerships to explore the level of concurrent use of benzodiazepines and opioids among Medicaid beneficiaries, a risk factor for poisoning deaths. Leveraging the existing MODRN infrastructure, which currently involves many of those states hardest hit by the opioid crisis, this research project enables the MODRN-OUD project to expand its research scope to include a focus on other controlled substances, and substance use disorders with the potential to extend beyond the current participants to include those states within other regions grappling with a different drug addiction crisis, such as, methamphetamines.