City to certify hospitals that adopt best practices for treating opioid addiction (Baltimore Fishbowl)

Monday Apr 30th, 2018

In a new initiative being launched with 11 Baltimore hospitals, the City Health Department plans to certify each one that adopts “best practices” for treating patients who overdose on opioids or are struggling with addiction.

The Levels of Care model, based on a system already used in Rhode Island, will score each city hospital from one to three based on how well they employ those practices.

Criteria will include proficiency with screening patients for addiction; connecting them to addiction-treatment resources; distributing the overdose-reversing medication naloxone; and, as Health Commissioner Dr. Leana Wen said at a press conference Monday morning, “making sure that their doctors are prescribing opioids judiciously so that we can end the cycle of addiction and overdose deaths.”

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When I’ve asked experts about these approaches, it’s not that any of them are bad. It’s that they fall short. For instance, Leana Wen, the former health commissioner of Baltimore (and soon-to-be president of Planned Parenthood), said that the Support for Patients and Communities Act “is simply tinkering around the edges.”

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