Northwell Health in New Hyde Park, New York, is bringing a new approach to the way it responds to the opioid and substance use epidemic.
Through a program called Pathways to Recovery, the health system is enabling clinicians in its emergency departments to provide interventions that can help patients get on the path to recovery from opioid use disorder. It will be rolled out in phases to Northwell’s 18 EDs.
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Pathways to Recovery includes several features:
- Universal screening. At 14 of Northwell’s EDs, clinical teams are using the Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment (or SBIRT) protocol with willing patients. It’s a set of questions that healthcare professionals can use to identify a patient’s risk of substance use disorder, assess their readiness to change and navigate them to appropriate treatment.
- Overdose prevention and protection. In 16 of the system’s EDs, Northwell has a NAL-SAT (naloxone saturation) campaign. Through it, healthcare professionals educate patients and their families on how to respond to an opioid overdose. Individuals at risk of experiencing or witnessing an overdose are given a free naloxone rescue kit, which is supplied through a partnership with New York State’s Department of Health. Naloxone reverses an overdose by knocking the opioid off its receptors in the brain.
- Navigation to sustained care. Patients who agree to addiction treatment can have EDs connect them to a “navigator” from Project Connect, a program that launched last year in collaboration with Central Nassau Guidance & Counseling Services. Said navigators accompany patients to treatment facilities and offer support and additional assistance. Thus far, Project Connect has aided patients from three Northwell EDs.
- Medications for addiction treatment. This type of treatment is available at four of Northwell’s emergency departments. The ED team starts treatment with buprenorphine, an FDA-approved medication that can help with recovery by reducing symptoms of withdrawal.
- Improving transfer and stabilization. Patients who need a streamlined way to move from the ED to longer-term care will get help via a collaboration between Northwell, the Nassau County District Attorney’s office and New Hope, a crisis stabilization center. New Hope employees can meet these patients at the ED and transport them to a specialized facility.
“With the Pathways to Recovery program, we are treating opioid use disorder with the same commitment and seriousness with which we approach other chronic diseases — and most importantly, with the same sense of compassion and empathy,” Sandeep Kapoor, director of Northwell’s SBIRT program, said in a statement.
Health systems aren’t the only ones working on the fight against the opioid epidemic. Several startups are also launching their own efforts.
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DynamiCare Health, a Boston-based company that recently raised $4.1 million in seed funding, has an addiction recovery technology platform. Another startup, MAP Health Management, seeks to help patients move into recovery by using telehealth to link them to peer support staffers. It secured a $25 million Series A round earlier this year.
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