McDermott Center (dba Haymarket Center), Chicago’s largest provider of SUD and mental health treatment, proposes to expand access to Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) for 375 individuals with opioid use disorders and co-occurring mental disorders, including serious mental illness. The project will stabilize the patients’ conditions and help sustain recovery by providing education, monitoring, and adherence assistance for all of the patients’ medications.
Haymarket Center served more than 9,000 individuals with opioid use disorders in 2017-2018. Yet medication education, monitoring, and administration are not Medicaid reimbursable services for agencies licensed by Illinois’s single state agency. Through grant funding, Haymarket Center has been able to provide MAT to a small portion of its service population. Haymarket has seen a strong demand for MAT services, especially among its residential treatment population with co-occurring opioid use disorders (OUD) and mental disorders, including serious mental illness (SMI). The proposed project will expand access to MAT for this population (Goal 1).
All participants will be assessed for a substance use disorder and meet with a psychological services team and psychiatrists as necessary, who may prescribe psychotropic medications. Project nurses will assess patients for appropriateness for MAT medications and work with patients and Haymarket’s board certified medical director, who has a waiver to prescribe or dispense buprenorphine and/or naltrexone under the Drug Addiction Treatment Act (DATA 2000), to identify the appropriate medication.
Only 50% of individuals with a chronic condition sustain any medication adherence. Adherence levels are dramatically worsened by OUD and mental disorders. Therefore, funding from this project will provide registered nurses who will assist in stabilizing the patients’ medical conditions; provide education on chronic disease management and medication adherence; administer MAT medications under the direction of a certified physician; and help them to navigate the complex health care systems in a culturally competent manner (Goal 2). Project staff will help patients sustain recovery by ensuring patients’ mental health and MAT medication regimens are included in their transition and recovery plans as they complete SUD treatment (Goal 3). They will ensure patients are linked to support groups that are MAT-positive in the community. Haymarket Center’s federally qualified health center partner, Heartland Alliance Health, as well as other partners, will accept clients for ongoing MAT maintenance in the community once they transition from Haymarket’s residential treatment program.
Data collection and performance measurement will be overseen by Lighthouse Institute, a division of Chestnut Health Systems that has extensive experience evaluating CSAT grants, collecting and reporting GPRA data, and following up with patients with OUD and mental disorders, including SMI, following discharge from treatment.
