Addressing the opioid epidemic: Treatment capacity expansion to reduce care disparities for opioid addiction disorders

The national opioid epidemic continues to worsen as abuse increases outpace treatment access, with many proposing additional state and federal funding for recovery services. To help public health departments plan effectively, we developed coupled models that optimize regional location of treatment facilities across any given state and simulated benefits on access delays, people receiving treatment, overdoses, and associated mortality. We optimized scenarios under expansion investments ranging from 5 to 20 additional treatment facilities across Massachusetts. Results estimate that optimally locating 20 new facilities would yield annual benefits of 18-day reductions in median treatment access delays, 2,332 prevented overdoses, and 237 avoided overdose-related deaths. These models and results can be useful to policy makers and public health officials by informing investment decisions and various tradeoff questions. Ongoing work is incorporating further complexities into the models and exploring the effectiveness of other interventions, such as treatment relapses, capacity pooling, and social distancing.