Buprenorphine use and courses of care for opioid use disorder treatment within the Veterans Health Administration

Background: Retention of patients in buprenorphine medication treatment for opioid use disorder (B-MOUD) reduces harms associated with opioid use disorder (OUD). We sought to characterize the patients receiving BMOUD and courses of B-MOUD in a large healthcare system. Methods: We conducted a retrospective, open cohort study of patients with OUD who either did or did not receive B-MOUD courses within the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) from January 2006 through July 2019, using VHA clinical data. We compared patients receiving or not receiving B-MOUD, characterized B-MOUD courses (e. g., length and doses), and examined persistence, across patient characteristics, over time. We used analyses for normally or non-normally distributed continuous variables, categorical data, and persistence over time (KaplanResults: We identified 255,726 Veterans with OUD; 40,431 (15.8%) had received 63,929 B-MOUD courses. Compared to patients with OUD without B-MOUD, patients with B-MOUD were younger, more often of white race, and had more co-morbidities. The frequency of new B-MOUD starts and prevalent B-MOUD patients ranged half of patients experiencing multiple courses. Patient demographics seem to dictate the length of courses.