Community Paramedic and Healthcare Partnerships to Increase Engagement With Medication Assisted Treatment

In 2020 Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, reported a 30% increase in opioid use disorder (OUD) deaths. Fragmentation of the county has resulted in many suburban municipalities neighboring the City of Milwaukee having high rates of overdose and OUD-related deaths, with little infrastructure or resources to address their needs. The West Allis Fire Department’s Mobile Integrated Health (WAFD’s MIH) Team of community paramedics and peer support counselors, Froedtert Health System (FH), community-based MAT clinics (CB-MAT), and other stakeholders have partnered to provide greater access to medication-assisted treatment (MAT) across the county.

This session will provide an overview of WAFD’s innovative MIH referral and service delivery model, workflows, and procedures to provide targeted outreach and facilitate engagement with MAT to those at-risk and patients with OUD. As emergency departments (EDs) are at times the only interaction with healthcare a person with OUD will have, this session also will briefly describe FH’s ED-based buprenorphine induction, its innovations, and how this program has partnered with WAFD’s MIH Team to provide holistic, wraparound service delivery to: 1) increase access to MAT, 2) increase retention of patients engaged in MAT at FH and CB-MAT, 3) follow-up with patients to reduce resource and other barriers to treatment engagement and initiation, 4) re-engage patients who leave treatment, 5) prioritize EMS transport to MAT-providing EDs, and 6) track important patient outcome data. As MIH and ED-based induction are increasingly being utilized across the country, presenters to provide lessons learned to increase partnerships between first responders and healthcare to address the opioid epidemic.