• Posted April 15, 2025

In-Hospital Addiction Consultations Put Opioid Users On Path To Recovery

People hospitalized for opioid use can better fight their addiction if their path to recovery begins in the hospital, a new study says.

Opioid users who receive addiction consultation services during their hospital stay are significantly more likely to start taking addiction meds and enter a treatment program, researchers reported in JAMA Internal Medicine.

A program to provide addiction consultation “addresses a major challenge across hospitals,” senior researcher Dr. Itai Danovitch, chair of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said in a news release.

“Even though effective medications exist for opioid use disorders, only a small percentage of hospitalized patients begin treatment during their stay or connect with services after discharge,” he said.

More than 81,000 people died from opioid ODs in the U.S. in 2023, researchers said in background notes.

Likewise, hospital admissions for opioid use disorder more than tripled between 2002 and 2018, rising from nearly 302,000 to just under 942,000, researchers said.

For the study, researchers evaluated the effectiveness of a program they called the Substance Use Treatment and Recovery Team (START), in which a doctor paired with a social worker or case manager to help hospitalized patients with opioid addiction.

The team provided patients with prescriptions for addiction medicines like buprenorphine, connections to outside treatment programs, and follow-up telephone calls for a month.

Researchers recruited 325 hospitalized patients 18 or older who likely had opioid use disorder. The patients were admitted between 2021 and 2023 at three U.S. hospitals — Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles; University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque, N.M.; and Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass.

Half the patients were randomly assigned to the START program, and the other half to usual hospital care.

About 57% of START patients began medication treatment for opioid addiction while in the hospital, compared with just under 27% of patients receiving usual care, results show.

What’s more, 72% of START patients accessed treatment programs and other follow-up care within 30 days after hospital discharge, compared with 48% of the control group, researchers said.

“Hospitalization provides a crucial window to involve patients in addiction treatment when they might be most open to it, particularly after experiencing health-related consequences of their substance use,” Dr. Jeffrey Golden, executive vice dean for research and education at Cedars-Sinai, said in a news release.

“These important findings show how the medical community can significantly boost this engagement and help find solutions for the national opioid epidemic,” added Golden, who was not involved in the study.

More information

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has more on treatment options for substance use disorder.

SOURCE: Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, news release, April 7, 2024