Arkansas Behavioral Health Integration Network

The overarching goal of the Arkansas Rural Opioid Use Training and Education (A-ROUTE) Consortium is to connect and support a network of community partners, state agencies, peer support specialists, and healthcare teams in a comprehensive program focused on educating rural communities, destigmatizing opioid use disorders, linking scarce critical resources, and providing high-quality services that ultimately eliminate overdose deaths. The objectives to support this goal include: 1) Increase community awareness of prevention, recovery, and treatment strategies while decreasing stigma; 2) Increase screening of individuals at risk of substance and opioid use disorders (SUD/OUD) and those with potential complications; 3) Increase the number of trained professionals providing Medication for Opioid Use Disorders (MOUD) services, prevention and recovery support options for OUD and increase utilization of recovery resources; 4) Increase local coordination of clinical and non-clinical services for patients with OUD and their families; 5) Increase access to peer recovery specialists, recovery communities, and recovery coaches among various clinical and non-clinical settings; and 6) Perform a robust evaluation of all A-ROUTE project goals to promote sustainability and scalability of activities. These objectives will target pressing needs and gaps in service identified by the A-ROUTE consortium during the RCORP planning year. The proposed project will continue the consortium’s work through a series of core prevention, treatment, and recovery activities that will link and integrate primary care teams, behavioral health providers, peer recovery specialists, state agencies, and community support services. The target service counties are economically depressed, have a high prevalence of OUD, display clear stigma against people with OUD across multiple sectors, and have few or no services to identify or help people in recovery or seeking treatment. These conditions have resulted in a “treatment desert” where prevention, treatment, and recovery management for patients falls largely on primary care providers and their care teams, many of whom lack the resources and training to help clients with OUD. A-ROUTE activities will be anchored in primary care as a means of reaching the target population and building sustainable community capacity to address OUD.