UT Health San Antonio announced Dec. 1 it had received a four-year, $2 million federal grant to expand its substance use disorder response program, Be Well Texas, to the state’s 178 rural counties that have limited or no access to resources and support addressing opioid addiction.
The release said with the Health Resources and Services Administration grant, Be Well Texas will lead and assist a consortium of 28 rural provider organizations in building a responsive behavioral health care delivery system with the capacity to reduce the morbidity and mortality of opioid use disorder, or OUD, among Texas’ rural residents.
That will more than double Be Well Texas’ provider network of 12 rural providers. The growth coupled with Be Well Texas’ telehealth capacity will ensure the availability of opioid use disorder treatment services in all of the state’s rural counties.
Briseida “Bee” Courtois, Be Well Texas’ provider network program manager and director of this grant project, said in a statement that deaths from opioid-related overdoses are one of the greatest health failures and partially attributable to unfairly distributed treatment resources.
“These types of need disparities led UT Health San Antonio to launch the Be Well Texas network,” Courtois said.
That disparity, the release said,. appears to be more pronounced in rural than in urban areas. More opioid prescriptions are dispensed to Texas’ rural residents per capita than to urban residents, which likely has become a source of supply for illegal drug markets and contributor to increasing overdose rates.
For example, while opioid pills were distributed at a rate of 29.4 per person living in Bexar County each year from 2006-14, the rate was 88.3 in Young County in North Texas, according to a Washington Post analysis of a database maintained by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
Opioid death rates in Texas might actually be higher than thought since the majority of the state’s rural counties do not report opioid-related mortality, the release said. This coupled with the fact that state data systems do not distinguish between urban and rural overdose deaths make it difficult to quantify the number of opioid-related deaths in Texas’ rural counties.
UT Health San Antonio officials said the new rural consortium will be a subset of the existing statewide Be Well Texas program.
The program serves more than 10,000 adults annually and consisting of 76 contracted medication-assisted treatment and/or office-based opioid treatment providers delivering substance use treatment—for opioid use, alcohol use, stimulant use and other substance use disorders—as well as nonsevere mental health treatment and peer recovery supports.
Commonly used substances include prescription and synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, and heroin, the release said.
UT Health San Antonio officials said objectives for the HRSA grant include building capacity to deliver low-barrier, digital and/or in-person OUD treatment and recovery support services according to participant needs and preferences.
