BALTIMORE — For Dr. Zachary Dezman, an emergency physician in this heroin-plagued city, there’s no question that offering addiction medicine to emergency room patients is the right thing to do.
People with a drug addiction are generally in poorer health than the rest of the population, he explained. “These patients are marginalized from the health care system. We see people every day who have nowhere else to go.
“If they need addiction medicine — and many do — why wouldn’t we give it to them in the ER? We give them medicine for every other life-threatening disease.”
But elsewhere in the country, all but a few emergency doctors and hospital administrators see things differently. They worry that offering addiction services could attract even more drug-seeking patients than they already see, taking up valuable staff time and beds, said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, co-director of the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis University.
Instead of providing anti-addiction medication, most hospitals typically give ER patients with drug-related conditions the telephone numbers of local treatment clinics, he said.
Despite a raging drug overdose epidemic that is killing nearly 200 Americans every day and sending thousands more to emergency rooms, the vast majority of the nation’s more than 5,500 hospitals have so far avoided offering any form of addiction medicine to emergency patients.
That’s starting to change.
In Dezman’s ER at the University of Maryland Medical Center Midtown Campus in West Baltimore — and in 10 other Maryland hospitals — addiction services, including starting patients on the highly effective anti-addiction medication buprenorphine, is a new and growing emergency service.
Similar services are planned for emergency departments in 18 more Maryland hospitals, according to Marla Oros, president of Mosaic Group, a management consulting firm that is providing technical assistance to the state’s hospitals.
Approved by the