(245) Quick Response Team- A New Model to Address Opioid Crisis

Objective : Substance use disorder has emerged as a major public health challenge over the past few decades. In particular, Huntington city, Cabell County, West Virginia is often named as the epi-center of the opiate drug crisis. The objective of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of a multidisciplinary Quick Response Team in reduction of overdoses to address the opioid crisis.

Methods: We conducted an interrupted time series analysis using autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) to investigate the effectiveness of Quick Response Team in contributing to the reduction of overdose cases during intervention period between December 2017 and June 2021 compared to the pre-intervention period between October 2014 and November 2017.

Results: Quick Response Team contacted a total of 727 men and 443 women with substance use disorder including those that have experienced an overdose during the intervention period and linked 205 men (29.0%) and 130 women (29.4%) to medication for opioid use disorder treatment and recovery programs through a warm handoff referral. Interrupted time series analysis using autoregressive integrated moving average model estimated a statistically significant immediate decline (step change) of 44 overdoses (p-value = .00002) in a month post intervention (95% CI, - 23 to - 64). The gradual decline (slope change) thereafter in number of overdoses was estimated as 4 (p-value =0.07) per month (95% CI, 0 to - 7).

Conclusions: Our findings suggest that quick response teams play an important role in contributing to the reduction in overdoses and the model can be easily adopted across communities with services tailored to the needs of their population.