Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Providers Slow to Consider Buprenorphine For Addiction Treatment

Buprenorphine—used to treat opioid use disorder—is the only drug that ever came with federal limits on the number of patients a provider could care for. It also came with restrictions on the types of clinicians who could prescribe it. Rules requiring the so-called “x-waiver” for prescribing clinicians were ultimately repealed in December 2022. Since then, providers have been able to offer buprenorphine to any number of patients who need addiction treatment and a path to …

The X-Waiver Is No More: What This Means for Urgent Care

Click Here to download the PDF. Urgent message: In December 2022, Congress passed the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment Act (W-Waiver), which would remove federal patient caps and allow any healthcare provider with a standard DEA controlled-medication license to prescribe buprenorphine. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc is Senior Editor of The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine and President of Experity Consulting. For over a decade, the question of whether or not to prescribe buprenorphine/naloxone (Suboxone) products in urgent …