Overcoming barriers to traditional care delivery and pharmacy challenges: a qualitative study of buprenorphine, telehealth, and a digital therapeutic for opioid use disorder.

Background: The opioid epidemic contributes to increasing morbidity and mortality due to drug overdoses in the US, but barriers to traditional opioid use disorder (OUD) treatment prevent a vast majority of patients from accessing quality care and medications for opioid use disorder (MOUDs). Public Health Emergency (PHE) provisions during the COVID-19 pandemic relaxed in-person evaluation requirements for buprenorphine inductions, allowing for the expansion of telehealth care to OUD populations. This qualitative study explores patients' experiences with a novel digital therapeutic telehealth program with buprenorphine for OUD.

Method: Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with a sub-sample (n = 15) of participants from a larger feasibility and acceptability pilot. Interviews explored participants' opioid use, OUD treatment history, previous MOUD experience, barriers to previous treatment attempts, medication adherence, counseling experience, treatment satisfaction, and comparisons between current and previous treatments.

Results: Barriers to care in previous OUD treatment episodes included logistical and program related inconveniences (program attendance requirements, commute distances, transportation, appointment wait times, and clinic patient volumes), financial strain, unreliable access to prescribers, residential program experiences, and the availability of detox-only based treatments. Participants with previous treatment experiences contrasted these barriers with the virtual delivery study setting and reported that the characteristics of telehealth OUD care facilitated improved engagement and retention by overcoming many of these barriers through: no transportation requirements, open and flexible appointment scheduling, appointment times confined to care team meetings only, absence of provider availability concerns, and the ability to receive buprenorphine maintenance care from home. The primary barrier noted for virtual care delivery was the fulfillment of buprenorphine prescriptions from local pharmacies.

Conclusion: A novel digital therapeutic telehealth program was reported to overcome almost all of the barriers encountered by participants during previous traditional OUD treatment episodes, contributing to a growing body of evidence supporting the permanency of current PHE expansions for OUD telehealth care. Findings also emphasize the importance of coming to workable policy solutions for buprenorphine supply threshold constraints on local pharmacies that unintentionally constrict access for telehealth and other OUD patients.