A Buprenorphine Retention Report to Measure Opioid Use Disorder Care Metrics and Guide Outreach.

Background: As opioid overdose rates remain high, systems-level tools are needed to monitor and improve the quality of care for opioid use disorder treatment. Although retention in care is a commonly used metric, the concept is variably defined in the literature, and clinics may not have real-time access to their own retention data.

Methods: We designed a Structured Query Language (SQL)-based reporting tool to provide real-time and summative metrics related to buprenorphine retention. A retrospective observational design is used to characterize the summative metrics for an urban network of community health centers.

Results: Among 569 patients started on buprenorphine between June 2020 and June 2022, by June 2023, 17% of patients remained actively engaged, 3% recently engaged, and 80% disengaged. Of those who disengaged, 55.4% did so after 3 or less prescriptions. The median duration of care was 5.3 months for all patients and 26.8 months for the 97 actively engaged patients. The median percentage of days covered by a buprenorphine prescription was 77.2% for actively engaged patients.

Conclusion: Implementation of the SQL report has given the clinic network access to real-time, nuanced buprenorphine retention data and has guided targeted patient outreach.