The work that led to this publication allowed me to discover and learn a lot from the US opioid crisis. Inspired by the globally-known HIV Care Continuum, we created something that looks like a “cascade analysis” in the opioid addiction treatment context, in Denver.
The analyses took more than a year because we had to integrate disconnected datasets and evaluate results with a team of experts in addiction medicine, evaluation, informatics, and public health at Denver Health.
We were able to develop a health-system view to model engagement along a continuum of care for opioid use disorders. It’s not perfect, but applied longitudinally at local, state, and national levels, this novel model could help to better synergize responses to the opioid crisis. We published this with the hope it will be helpful in other US communities and will be a fundamental piece in the newly established Center for Addiction Medicine in Denver Health.
The article was published here, in Drug and Alcohol Dependence.