Coordinating Outpatient bupreNorphiNe for Emergency Care and Continuing Treatment

The main purpose of this stepped wedge trial will be to test the impact of a bundle of implementation strategies designed to improve ED-outpatient care coordination on long-term buprenorphine retention among adult patients who start buprenorphine for opioid use disorder in a hospital emergency department (ED) and then are referred for continued outpatient buprenorphine treatment after they leave the ED. Our hypothesis is that adopting the bundle of implementation strategies will be associated with subsequent increases in:

A) Cumulative number of days with active buprenorphine prescription at 3, 6, and 12 months after patients' initial ED visit (6 months = primary outcome)

B) Proportion of patients with active buprenorphine prescriptions without gaps in buprenorphine coverage of more than 7 days at 3, 6, and 12 months after patients' initial ED visit

C) Proportion of patients who fill at least 1 outpatient buprenorphine prescription within 30 days of their ED visit

D) Clinician reported quality of ED-outpatient care coordination and care transitions