Elevating Patient Voices to Improve Opioid Use Disorder Quality Measurement: A Survey Protocol

Public payers in the US cover more than half of individuals who receive treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD). Despite this, patient-reported measures that reflect treatment engagement and quality of life are largely missing from OUD quality improvement initiatives. This commentary describes the survey protocol for Project ELVIS (ELevating patient VoIceS to Improve OUD Treatment Quality), 1 of 3 projects of the Medicaid Outcomes Distributed Research Network's initiative Examining Quality Improvement in Medicaid Programs. Project ELVIS collects patient experiences with OUD treatment and tests the relationship between patient-reported and claims-based measures of treatment quality. As this commentary describes, Project ELVIS is innovative in its approach to grounding measure development in sustained, iterative engagement with individuals with lived experience and Medicaid policymakers and in employing a policy-driven regional survey sampling approach that prioritizes Medicaid decision-making relevance. Our project is also innovative in its planned linkages of self-reported patient experiences and outcomes with quality measures based on administrative data, positioning patient experience to explain-not just quantify-treatment quality in Medicaid programs. The goals of this project are to inform mechanisms underlying providers' high (and low) performance on claims-based measures, offering insight into why patients initiate, remain engaged in, or discontinue medication for OUD. In doing so, this work endeavors to support the development of patient-centered, process-based quality measures that complement existing and emerging utilization-based metrics.