Buprenorphine Course, Session Cover All the Bases

The one-day buprenorphine course at this year’s APA Annual Meeting in New Orleans will go beyond meeting the current requirements for the Drug Enforcement Agency’s X waiver for prescribing buprenorphine for the treatment of opioid use disorder (OUD) and offer a multifacted primer on office-based treatment of OUD. APA will also offer a session to enhance attendees’ knowledge of buprenorphine regulation and update attendees on the current epidemic of fentanyl, carfentanil, and other fentanyl analogs.

“While we will teach people the fundamentals of buprenorphine induction, stabilization, and maintenance, we will go beyond that to cover counseling and psychotherapy for people who suffer from opioid use disorder,” said Petros Levounis, M.D., M.A., chair of the one-day course and APA’s incoming president-elect. He is the chair of psychiatry at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. “The course is intended to cover not just the pharmacotherapy aspect, but also the psychiatric and social components of treating patients with opioid use disorder.”

In addition to covering recordkeeping, billing, and confidentiality rules, the course will include instruction on diagnostic criteria for OUD. It will cover how to distinguish independent psychiatric disorders from substance-induced psychiatric disorders, present common clinical events associated with addictive behavior, and offer guidance on treating special populations such as patients who are adolescents, pregnant, or have HIV.

In a separate, interactive session, attendees will learn about recent changes in the epidemiology of OUD with respect to fentanyl and fentanyl analogs. The session is geared toward psychiatrists who already offer buprenorphine to their patients and will cover recent regulatory changes, the latest research on buprenorphine, and the impact of new formulations of buprenorphine. It will also cover evolving standards of care for medication treatment of OUD, treatment of opioid overdose, ways of eliminating barriers to long-term medication treatment, and plans to expand access to evidence-based treatment within the justice system.

John Renner, M.D., session chair and ex-officio member of APA’s Council on Addiction Psychiatry, said this session will be more of a discussion group compared with the all-day course. He is a professor of psychiatry at Boston University.

“We’ll ask questions and have back-and-forth discussions with the audience,” Renner said. “We’ll talk about microdosing (new techniques for transitioning between medications for opioid use disorder), and the recent black-box warning about tooth decay.” (See Psychiatric News Alert). ■