Implementation Evaluation of an Emergency Department Community Health Worker-Peer Recovery Specialist Program for People with Opioid Use Disorder

Elizabeth Samuels, MD, MPH, MHS

Elizabeth Samuels, MD, MPH, MHS

Brown Emergency Medicine, Rhode Island Hospital
55 Claverick Street, 2nd Floor
Providence, RI 02903
Phone:

Tel: 401-519-0330
Email: Elizabeth_Samuels@brown.edu

Dr. Samuels is an emergency medicine physician, health services trained researcher, and Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She completed her emergency medicine training at the Brown Emergency Medicine Residency Program, a health service research and health policy fellowship at the Yale National Clinician Scholars Program, and is board certified in Emergency Medicine and Addiction Medicine. Her work focuses on social emergency medicine and health equity initiatives, specifically community health worker/peer recovery programs, harm reduction services, low barrier substance use disorder treatment, care of transgender and gender nonbinary people, health care workforce diversity, and emergency department programs to address health related social needs.

She currently serves as the consulting Assistant Medical Director for the Rhode Island Department of Health’s (RIDOH) Drug Overdose Prevention Program. In this role, Dr. Samuels is leading implementation and evaluation of Rhode Island’s statewide standards of care for ED and hospital treatment of opioid overdose and opioid use disorder, including expansion of ED-initiated buprenorphine. In 2020, she helped establish the Substance Misuse Assistance Response Team (SMART), at Rhode Island Hospital, an emergency department-based community health worker-peer recovery specialist program to both address the social determinants of recovery and link patients to harm reduction services and addiction treatment. She currently helps lead the Rhode Island Buprenorphine Hotline, an audio-only buprenorphine telehealth service which provides low barrier buprenorphine treatment access with linkage to maintenance treatment.

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This website is supported by the COBRE on Opioids and Overdose funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under grant number P20GM125507. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.