National Quality Measure Fails to Capture Most Emergency Department Patients With Opioid Use Disorder.

StudyJournal of addiction medicine· Sep 2026

National Quality Measure Fails to Capture Most Emergency Department Patients With Opioid Use Disorder.

Erik S Anderson, Megan Heeney, Evan Rusoja … Andrew A Herring

Read paper

Addiction MedicineStudyClinical practiceQ1IF 2.8

FUA quality measure missed 4 of 5 opioid use disorder emergency department visits

National Quality Measure Fails to Capture Most Emergency Department Patients With Opioid Use Disorder.

Erik S Anderson … Andrew A Herring

Journal of addiction medicine · Sep 2026 · Q1 in Psychiatry

Purpose

We hypothesized that the FUA denominator undercounts opioid use disorder-related emergency department visits.

Methods

We audited a multihospital public health system's electronic health record (electronic health record) to identify emergency department visits by patients with opioid use disorder to compare these with the opioid use disorder visits captured in the system's automated FUA reporting.

n = 1211 emergency department (ED)

Results

19.7%

only 1 in 5 opioid emergency department visits were captured by the quality measure

n = 1211 emergency department (ED)

More results

From April 1, 2024, through February 28, 2025, there were 1211 emergency department (emergency department) unique visits related to opioid use disorder (opioid use disorder) or overdose.

In multivariable logistic regression, emergency department visits at one of the hospitals were less likely to be included in the FUA measure (adjusted odds ratio, 0.6, 95% CI: 0.4-0.9).

“

Conclusion · 1 of 2

We found the FUA measure failed to identify 4 out of 5 emergency department visits involving high-risk opioid use disorder-related events.

Conclusion · 2 of 2

This suggests FUA may obscure quality performance and introduces variability into the national quality measure.

National Quality Measure Fails to Capture Most Emergency Department Patients With Opioid Use Disorder.

National Quality Measure Fails to Capture Most Emergency Department Patients With Opioid Use Disorder.

Related papers