Adverse health effects of the opioid epidemic continue to climb. Opioid-related overdose deaths reached an all-time high of 42,249 in 2016,¹ prompting President Trump to declare an opioid public health emergency in 2017. From July 2016 to September 2017, emergency department visits associated with opioid-related overdoses spiked about 30%.² Those with opioid use disorders (OUDs) face dramatically increased risk of early death, typically from overdose. Provision of evidence-based medication-assisted treatment (MAT), which can involve methadone, buprenorphine, or naltrexone, to those with OUDs has been shown to reduce the risk of death by as much as 50%.³ Yet access to MAT remains severely inadequate—notably in rural America, particularly hard hit by the epidemic. Policymakers generally agree that more widespread access to MAT is desperately needed; the question remains: how?

Prominent among strategies proposed to ramp-up MAT access is providing it via telemedicine. Telemedicine, or the remote delivery of health care using telecommunications technology, has the potential to increase access to MAT medicines and concurrent therapy in underserved, remote rural areas by providing direct-to-patient or specialty consultation services from afar. Although telemedicine to treat patients with OUDs has been piloted favorably, scaling up its provision is not as simple as connecting a patient to a provider. Rather, stakeholders must surmount considerable regulatory, logistical, and quality hurdles before telemedicine can help to mitigate the opioid epidemic.

Read more of this perspective from the Mayo Clinic below.