ArticleImplementation science communications2023
Costs of implementing a multi-site facilitation intervention to increase access to medication treatment for opioid use disorder.
Article in Implementation science communications, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 10 citations in OpenAlex.
- Healthcare Expenditures Associated With Implementing an External Facilitation Program to Increase the Prescribing of Medications Used for the Treatment of Opioid Use Disorder Among Veterans.Substance use & addiction journal · 2025Trial
- The role of external and internal context on adoption and implementation of evidence-based practices: a serial case study qualitative analysis of top performers in the HEALing Communities Study.Implementation science communications · 2026Article
- A cost analysis of implementing facilitated improvements in hospital palliative care using patient reported experience measures: the LEAHP (Listen Empower Act - Hospital Palliative care) bundle.BMC palliative care · 2026Article
- Economic cost of strategic implementation approaches to increase uptake of digital therapeutics for substance use disorders in a large integrated health system.PLOS digital health · 2026Article
- Evaluating spoke facilitation costs of implementing TelePain in the Veterans Health Administration.Implementation science communications · 2025Article
- Implementation, intervention, and downstream costs for implementation of a multidisciplinary complex pain clinic in the Veterans Health Administration.Health services research · 2024Article
- Cost of start-up activities to implement a community-level opioid overdose reduction intervention in the HEALing Communities Study.Addiction science & clinical practice · 2024Article
- A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Practice Facilitation to Improve Delivery of Unhealthy Alcohol Use Screening and Management Services in Primary Care: A Qualitative Study.Journal of primary care & community healthArticle
- "We Have a Moral Commitment to the Community to Sustain It": Exploring Determinants of Strategy Sustainment After the HEALing Communities Study.Implementation research and practiceArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
13 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundThe United States has been grappling with the opioid epidemic, which has resulted in over 75,000 opioid-related deaths between April 2020 and 2021. Evidence-based pharmaceutical interventions (buprenorphine, methadone, and naltrexone) are available to reduce opioid-related overdoses and deaths. However, adoption of these medications for opioid use disorder has been stifled due to individual- and system-level barriers. External facilitation is an evidence-based implementation intervention that has been used to increase access to medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD), but the implementation costs of external facilitation have not been assessed. We sought to measure the facility-level direct costs of implementing an external facilitation intervention for MOUD to provide decision makers with estimates of the resources needed to implement this evidence-based program.
methodsWe performed a cost analysis of the pre-implementation and implementation phases, including an itemization of external facilitation team and local site labor costs. We used labor estimates from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, and sensitivity analyses were performed using labor estimates from the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Financial Management System general ledger data.
resultsThe average total costs for implementing an external facilitation intervention for MOUD per site was $18,847 (SD 6717) and ranged between $11,320 and $31,592. This translates to approximately $48 per patient with OUD. Sites with more encounters and participants with higher salaries in attendance had higher costs. This was driven mostly by the labor involved in planning and implementation activities. The average total cost of the pre-implementation and implementation activities were $1031 and $17,816 per site, respectively. In the sensitivity analysis, costs for VHA were higher than BLS estimates likely due to higher wages.
conclusionsImplementing external facilitation to increase MOUD prescribing may be affordable depending on the payer's budget constraints. Our study reported that there were variations in the time invested at each phase of implementation and the number and type of participants involved with implementing an external facilitation intervention. Participant composition played an important role in total implementation costs, and decision makers will need to identify the most efficient and optimal number of stakeholders to involve in their implementation plans.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.