A study published Wednesday in the medical journal JAMA Network Open found that emergency room clinicians were much less likely to refer Black opioid overdose patients for outpatient treatment compared with white patients.
The researchers looked at the medical records of 1,683 opioid overdose patients from emergency rooms in nine states: California, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and Pennsylvania.
About 5.7% of Black patients received referrals for outpatient treatment, compared with 9.6% of white patients, according to the researchers, who received a federal grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to conduct the analysis.
While the nation saw a decrease in opioid overdose deaths in white people between 2021 and 2022, overdose death rates increased for American Indian, Alaska Native, Asian, Black and Hispanic people. Patients visiting ERs for opioid overdoses are more likely to die from an overdose after the visit, the authors wrote, underscoring the importance of gaining “an improved understanding of disparities in [emergency department] treatment and referral.”
In total, roughly 18% of the patients received a referral for outpatient treatment, 43% received a naloxone kit or prescription, and 8.4% received a prescription for buprenorphine, the first-line medication for treating opioid use disorder.
The researchers used records from 10 hospital sites participating in a national consortium collecting data on overdoses from fentanyl and its related drugs. The patient records were from September 2020 to November 2023.
Another study in JAMA Network Open, released Thursday, found similar disparities: Black and Hispanic patients were significantly less likely than white patients to receive buprenorphine. Black patients had a 17% chance, and Hispanic patients a 16% chance, to be prescribed the therapy, compared with a 20% chance for white patients.
The authors of that study, from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, looked at data from 176,000 records of opioid-related events between 2017 and 2022 across all 50 states.
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