{"id":290755,"date":"2026-09-21T11:12:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T11:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/290755\/"},"modified":"2026-09-21T11:12:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T11:12:09","slug":"hospitals-pharmacies-expand-buprenorphine-access","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/290755\/","title":{"rendered":"Hospitals, pharmacies expand buprenorphine access"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>                                                                                                                                                                                                                        More rural and urban hospitals, pharmacies stock up on treatment medication<\/p>\n<p>Historically, access to buprenorphine medication <a href=\"https:\/\/whyy.org\/articles\/opioid-addiction-medication-philadelphia-study-buprenorphine\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">has been inconsistent<\/a>. Some pharmacies do not have it in stock on a regular basis, if at all, and not all emergency departments have been proactive in offering and enrolling people into medication for opioid use disorder.\n<\/p>\n<p>But new data from the CDC shows from 2019 through 2025, the percentage of U.S. pharmacies in urban areas that stocked buprenorphine grew from about 65% to 72%. Among rural pharmacies, it grew from 70% to 80%.\n<\/p>\n<p>Pharmacies also prescribed a longer supply of buprenorphine, on average, per prescription, likely due to changes and flexibilities in federal drug laws, the study\u2019s authors noted.\n<\/p>\n<p>In hospitals, the percentage of emergency departments that adopted buprenorphine treatment in urban counties rose from about 7% to 31%, and from 2% to 10% in rural counties.\n  <\/p>\n<p>Addressing remaining gaps in medication treatment<\/p>\n<p>Philadelphia is a city that has created a \u201csafety net\u201d and built an infrastructure of emergency and short- and <a href=\"https:\/\/whyy.org\/articles\/opioid-use-disorder-injectable-medication-prevention-point-philadelphia\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">long-term addiction treatmen<\/a>t programs, Perrone said, mostly out of necessity.\n<\/p>\n<p>While overdose deaths <a href=\"https:\/\/whyy.org\/articles\/philadelphia-drug-overdose-decrease-medetomidine-xylazine-heroin-fentanyl\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">have declined<\/a> in recent years, hundreds of people still die annually from synthetic opioids and street substances.\n<\/p>\n<p>Providers at Penn Medicine say they\u2019ve been able to improve treatment access even more with a telehealth program that helps coordinate care for patients.\n<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSo, if a patient misses an appointment, they miss their buprenorphine prescription, they can call us, we can bridge that gap. We can make some calls to get them another appointment either back where they were before or to a new program,\u201d Perrone said. \u201cSo, this has been really robust.\u201d\n<\/p>\n<p>But these connections and pathways and infrastructure are less likely to exist in rural communities, she said, where providers have been slower to build up care.\n<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s why Perrone sees telehealth as a tool that could support more communities in connecting patients to medication availability, addiction treatment providers and peer recovery support specialists, no matter where they live.\n<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe could really support more emergency departments and practices in creating this bigger safety net across Pennsylvania, knowing that there are these rural health gaps,\u201d she said.\n        <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More rural and urban hospitals, pharmacies stock up on treatment medication Historically, access to buprenorphine medication has been&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":290756,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64862,30344,69,71,70],"class_list":["post-290755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-buprenorphine","tag-opioid-addiction","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290755\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}