Buprenorphine, a relative newcomer in the treatment of opioid addiction, is growing in popularity among California doctors as regulatory changes, physician training and other initiatives make the medication more widely accessible.
METHODOLOGY
The data we used, from the California Department of Health Care Services, show the number of patients for whom claims were submitted to Medi-Cal for buprenorphine and methadone.
The department counts the number of people with claims for these medications by quarter. Our analysis began with the fourth quarter of 2014 and, for buprenorphine, it ended with the third quarter of 2018. For methadone, the available data go only through the end of 2017.
For each quarter, KHN calculated the rate of individuals, per 10,000 Medi-Cal enrollees, who received methadone and buprenorphine. That allowed us to control for the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, which swelled the ranks of Medi-Cal from 8.6 million at the end of 2013 to about 13 million as of September 2018.
The quarterly totals are likely an undercount, because the DHCS excludes data for a medication in any county where the number of people who received that medication is 10 or fewer.
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Source: by [#item_author] from Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente. More Read More