Medicaid
Study Highlights Need for Continued Care of COVID-19 Survivors
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
The past several months have shown that most people hospitalized with COVID-19 will get better. As inspiring as it is to see these patients breathe on their own and converse with their loved ones again, we are learning that many will leave the hospital still quite ill and in need of further care. But little has been published to offer a detailed demographic picture of those being discharged from our nation’s hospitals and the types of community-based care and monitoring that will be needed to keep them on the road to recovery.
A recent study in the journal EClinicalMedicine helps to fill in those gaps by chronicling the early COVID-19 experience of three prominent hospitals in the Boston area: Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Newton-Wellesley Hospital. These data were reported from a patient registry of 247 middle-aged and older COVID-19 patients. The patients were admitted over three weeks last March into one of these hospitals, which are part of New England’s largest integrated health network.
The data confirm numerous previous reports that COVID-19 disproportionately affects people of color. The researchers, led by Jason H. Wasfy and Cian P. McCarthy, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, found a large number of their patients were Hispanic (30 percent) or Black (10 percent). Wasfy said these numbers could be driven by many factors, including a low income, more family members living in one home, greater difficulty accessing healthcare, presence of chronic illness (health disparities), and serving as essential workers during the pandemic.
The researchers also tracked the patients after discharge for about 80 days. About a third of patients left the hospital for a post-acute care facility to continue their rehabilitation. After discharge, many required supplemental oxygen (15 percent), tube feeding (9 percent), or treatment with medications including antipsychotics and prescription painkillers (16 percent). About 10 percent were readmitted to the hospital within weeks or months of their initial discharge.
Wasfy and colleagues also found:
· Many patients undergoing treatment were enrolled in Medicaid (20 percent) or both Medicaid and Medicare (12 percent).
· A substantial number also were retired (36 percent) or unemployed (8.5 percent), highlighting the role of non-occupational spread. Many others worked in the hospitality industry, healthcare, or public transportation.
· A large proportion (42 percent) of hospitalized patients required intensive care. The good news is that most of them (86 percent) ultimately recovered enough to be discharged from the hospital. Tragically, 14 percent—34 of 247 people—died in the hospital.
These findings represent hospitals in just one notable American city hard hit early in the pandemic. But they spotlight the importance of public health efforts to prevent COVID-19 among the most vulnerable and reduce its most devastating social impacts. These are critical points, and NIH has recently begun supporting community engagement research efforts in areas hardest hit by COVID-19. With this support and access to needed post-discharge care, we aim to help more COVID survivors stay on the road to a full recovery.
Reference:
[1] Early clinical and sociodemographic experience with patients hospitalized with COVID-19 at a large American healthcare system. McCarthy CP et al. EClinicalMedicine. August 19, 2020.
Links:
Coronavirus (COVID-19) (NIH)
Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston)
Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Boston)
Newton-Wellesley Hospital (Newton, MA)
Jason Wasfy (Massachusetts General Hospital)
After Opioid Overdose, Most Young People Aren’t Getting Addiction Treatment
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Drug overdoses continue to take far too many lives, driven primarily by the opioid crisis (though other drugs, such as methamphetamine and cocaine, are also major concerns). While NIH’s Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative is taking steps to address this terrible crisis, new findings serve as another wake-up call that young people battling opioid addiction need a lot more assistance to get back on the right track.
In a study of more than 3,600 individuals, aged 13-22, who survived an opioid overdose, an NIH-funded team found that only about one-third received any kind of follow-up addiction treatment [1]. Even more troubling, less than 2 percent of these young people received the gold standard approach of medication treatment.
The findings reported in JAMA Pediatrics come from Rachel Alinsky, an adolescent medicine and addiction medicine fellow at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, Baltimore. She saw first-hand the devastating toll that opioids are taking on our youth.
Alinsky also knew that nationally more than 4,000 fatal opioid overdoses occurred in people between the ages of 15 and 24 in 2016 [2]. Likewise, rates of nonfatal opioid overdoses for teens and young adults also have been escalating, leading to more than 7,000 hospitalizations and about 28,000 emergency department visits in 2015 alone [3].
In the latest study, Alinsky wanted to find out whether young people who overdose receive timely treatment to help prevent another life-threatening emergency. According to our best evidence-based guidelines, timely treatment for youth with an opioid addiction should include medication, ideally along with behavioral interventions.
That’s because opioid addiction rewires the brain—will power alone is simply not sufficient to achieve and sustain recovery. After one overdose, the risk of dying from another one rises dramatically. So, it is critical to get those who survived an overdose into effective treatment right away.
Alinsky and her team dove into the best-available dataset, consisting of data on more than 4 million mostly low-income adolescents and young adults who’d been enrolled in Medicaid for at least six months in 16 states. The sample included 3,606 individuals who’d been seen by a doctor and diagnosed with opioid poisoning. A little over half of them were female; most were non-Hispanic whites.
Heroin accounted for about a quarter of those overdoses. The rest involved other opioids, most often prescription painkillers. However, the researchers note that some overdoses attributed to heroin might have been caused by the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl. The use of fentanyl, often mixed with heroin, was on the rise in the study’s final years, but it was rarely included in drug tests at the time.
Less than 20 percent of young people in the sample received a diagnosis of opioid use disorder, or a problematic pattern of opioid use resulting in impairment or distress. What’s more, in the month following an overdose, few received the current standard for addiction treatment, which should include behavioral therapy and treatment with one of three drugs: buprenorphine, naltrexone, or methadone.
Drilling a little deeper into the study’s findings:
• 68.9 percent did not receive addiction treatment of any kind.
• 29.3 percent received behavioral health services alone.
• Only 1.9 percent received one of three approved medications for opioid use disorder.
It’s been estimated previously that teens and young adults are one-tenth as likely as adults 25 years and older to get the recommended treatment for opioid use disorder [4]. How can that be? The researchers suggest that one factor might be inexperience among pediatricians in diagnosing and treating opioid addiction. They also note that, even when the problem is recognized, doctors sometimes struggle to take the next step and connect young people with addiction treatment facilities that are equipped to provide the needed treatment to adolescents.
As this new study shows, interventions designed to link teens and young adults with the needed recovery treatment and care are desperately needed. As we continue to move forward in tackling this terrible crisis through the NIH’s HEAL Initiative and other efforts, finding ways to overcome such systemic barriers and best engage our youth in treatment, including medication, will be essential.
References:
[1] Receipt of addiction treatment after opioid overdose among Medicaid-enrolled adolescents and young adults. Alinsky RH, Zima BT, Rodean J, Matson PA, Larochelle MR, Adger H Jr, Bagley SM, Hadland SE. JAMA Pediatr. 2020 Jan 6:e195183.
[2] Overdose death rates. National Institute on Drug Abuse, NIH.
[3] 2018 annual surveillance drug-related risks and outcomes—United States: surveillance special report. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
[4] Medication-assisted treatment for adolescents in specialty treatment for opioid use disorder. Feder KA, Krawczyk N, Saloner B. J Adolesc Health. 2017 Jun;60(6):747-750.
Links:
Opioid Overdose Crisis (National Institute on Drug Abuse/NIH)
Opioid Overdose (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta)
Decisions in Recovery: Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Rockville, MD)
Rachel Alinsky (Johns Hopkins University Children’s Center, Baltimore)
Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative (NIH)
NIH Support: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; National Institute on Drug Abuse
