Neighborhood boosting treatment for opioid addiction

SMITHFIELD – Neighborhood Health Plan of Rhode Island is expanding access to medications for those members with opioid addictions who seek treatment.

Specifically, Neighborhood removed its requirements for prior authorization for Suboxone (the trade name of buprenorphine/naloxone) tablets, up to a maximum dose of 24 milligrams per day. As a result, Neighborhood members have more options about where and when they initiate or continue Suboxone treatment, Neighborhood, which currently has a total of approximately 186,000 members, said in a release.

Neighborhood also removed “fail first” criteria for the use of Vivitrol (the trade name of the long-acting injectable naltrexone) to treat opioid and alcohol use disorder. By making this change, Neighborhood permits its members to use Vivitrol as their first-line treatment.

“We are committed to providing access to medication-assisted therapy because we know it works, saves lives and improves quality of life,” Dr. Tracey Cohen, Neighborhood’s medical director, said in the statement.

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In addition, Neighborhood has worked on several fronts to reduce its members’ inappropriate use of opioids: Assigned to a “pharmacy home,” members with high-risk pharmacy profiles are provided non-opioid methods to treat pain and Neighborhood has progressively decreased the maximum morphine equivalent dosing for all covered opioids and reduced the use of OxyContin, a particularly addictive opioid, by more than one-third during the last five years. According to a spokesperson for Neighborhood, it has about 1,000 members with high-risk pharmacy profiles and who have a pharmacy home.

“These improvements … supplement the recent efforts of Governor Gina Raimondo, the Overdose Prevention Task Force and legislation by the General Assembly. As the largest Medicaid-managed care health plan in Rhode Island, Neighborhood is committed to addressing this serious, and too often fatal, chronic illness,” said Cohen.

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