She said Rhode Island's program could be a national model for how to begin turning the tide in the opioid epidemic.
Traci Green, an adjunct associate professor of emergency medicine and epidemiology at Brown and a senior researcher at Rhode Island Hospital, is the study's lead author. "With this study, we wanted to see if that intervention could impact statewide overdose mortality, and the answer is a resounding yes."ĭr. Josiah "Jody" Rich, professor of medicine and epidemiology at Brown University and director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at The Miriam Hospital in Providence. "This program reaches an extremely vulnerable population at an extremely vulnerable time with the best treatment available for opioid use disorder," said study co-author Dr. While the study, published in JAMA Psychiatry, was designed as a preliminary evaluation of the program, the results suggest that comprehensive MAT treatment in jails and prisons, with linkage to treatment in the community after release, is a promising strategy for rapidly addressing the opioid epidemic nationwide, the researchers say. That decrease contributed to an overall 12 percent reduction in overdose deaths in the state's general population in the post-implementation period.
Comparing the six-month period before the program was implemented to the same period a year later, the study showed a 61 percent decrease in post-incarceration deaths. The program, launched in 2016 and the only one of its kind in the nation, screens all Rhode Island inmates for opioid use disorder and provides medications for addiction treatment (MAT) for those who need it.
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