Excellence in Teamwork
This team executed the first program of its kind in Texas and and one of the few in the country to empower hospitalists to treat opioid use disorder as a routine part of acute hospitalization.
The Buprenorphine Team (“B-Team”) at Dell Seton Medical Center and Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin is a hospitalist-led interprofessional team that has worked over the past four years to transform internal organizational culture and the standard of care for recognizing and managing opioid use disorder (OUD) in the hospital setting.
The team, including hospitalists, psychiatrists, palliative care practitioners, social workers, nurses, pharmacists, chaplains, and people with live experience was founded in 2017 to identify patients with OUD, start buprenorphine therapy for interested patients, implement hospital-based harm reduction strategies, link patients directly to addiction care after discharge, and provide institutional education to reduce stigma of patients with substance use disorders. The B-Team was the first program of its kind in Texas and one of few in the country to empower hospitalists to treat OUD as a routine part of acute hospitalization.
The B-Team has systematically engaged team members at five additional hospitals across Texas to work as a collaborative team to expand access to medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) for hospitalized patients. Moving forward, the team will work on expanding the program to additional substance use disorder diagnoses. The emphasis on teamwork and collaboration allowed the partner hospitals to increase statewide institutional knowledge and comfort with buprenorphine and other MOUD. The B-Team presents a highly effective model that has proven to be transferrable using existing hospital resources.
