• Adam J Gordon, Jodie A Trafton, Andrew J Saxon, Allen L Gifford, Francine Goodman, Vincent S Calabrese, Laura McNicholas, Joseph Liberto, and Buprenorphine Work Group of the Substance Use Disorders Quality Enhancement Research Initiative.
• VISN 4 Mental Illness, Research, Education, and Clinical Center, Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion, VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System, Mailcode 151-C, University Drive C, Pittsburgh, PA 15240, United States. adam.gordon@va.gov
• Drug Alcohol Depend. 2007 Oct 8;90(2-3):292-6.

BackgroundCompared to non-veterans, veterans are disproportionately diagnosed with opioid dependence. Sublingual buprenorphine provides greater access to opioid agonist therapy. To understand the diffusion of this innovative treatment within a large healthcare system, we describe the introduction of buprenorphine within the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) during the first 3 years of its approval as a VHA non-formulary medication.MethodsUsing VHA pharmacy databases, we examined the number of physicians who have prescribed buprenorphine and the number of veterans who have received office-based buprenorphine within VHA veterans integrated service networks (VISN) from fiscal years (FY) 2003 through FY 2005 (October 2002 through September 2005).ResultsFrom FY2003 through FY2005 the number of veterans with opioid dependence increased from 25,031 to 26,859 (>7.3%) and the number of veterans prescribed office-based buprenorphine increased from 53 to 739. During this interval, 16 of 21 VISNs had prescribed buprenorphine. In FY2005, two VISNs accounted for 31% of buprenorphine prescriptions. The number of buprenorphine prescriptions varied widely by VISN, but increased from 212 to 7076 from FY2003 through FY2005. During this interval, prescriptions per patient increased from 4.0 to 9.6 and physicians prescribing buprenorphine increased from 14 to 170. The ratio of patients prescribed buprenorphine to providers prescribing buprenorphine increased from 3.8 to 4.3 with an average increase of 15.1-41.6 of prescriptions per provider.ConclusionsVHA increased, but not uniformly, the non-formulary use of office-based buprenorphine during the first 3 years of availability.

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