State Medicaid programs play a critical role in financing pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic treatments for opioid use disorder (OUD) as they provide coverage for 4 in 10 individuals with OUD. States are currently taking myriad approaches to address the opioid crisis by changing the way they regulate providers, pay for care, and cover evidence-based treatments in Medicaid. However, there exists no analytic infrastructure for learning about the impact of state policy experimentation on OUD treatment and outcomes as states have no mechanism for sharing data or measurement tools.

With funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), AcademyHealth's Evidence-Informed State Health Policy Institute, in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh, are engaging MODRN state-university partnerships in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Maine, and Massachusetts to address this issue. These states account for over a quarter of the country's Medicaid enrollees, and the partnerships have access to complete and recent Medicaid data. Our objectives are to provide a comprehensive assessment of OUD treatment quality and outcomes in Medicaid and to inform policy decisions on coverage and payment for evidence-based OUD treatments in Medicaid.

This work is supported by a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) R01DA048029.

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Julie Donohue
Researcher

Julie Donohue, Ph.D.

Professor & Chair - Department of Health Policy and Management, School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh

Julie M. Donohue, Ph.D., is the principal lead on AcademyHealth's Medicaid Outcomes Distributed Research Netwo... Read Bio