Treatment of Opioid Use Disorder: Waiver Qualifying - 8 Hours Online - UNC AHRQ

Daniel Alford, MD, MPH, FACP, DFASAM is a Professor of Medicine and Associate Dean of Continuing Medical Education at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM). He is on staff in the Section of General Internal Medicine and Director of the Clinical Addiction Research and Education (CARE) Unit at Boston Medical Center. He is the Medical Director of the CDC-funded Boston Sustainable Models for unhealthy Alcohol use ReducTion (B SMART) and the HRSA funded SBIRT And FASD Education, Support and Treatment (SAFEST) Choice programs. 

Dr. Edwin A. Salsitz has been an attending physician in the Mount Sinai Beth Israel , Division of Chemical Dependency, New York City, since 1983, and is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He is the principal investigator of the Methadone Medical Maintenance (office-based methadone maintenance) research project. Dr. Salsitz is certified in Addiction Medicine by the American Board of Preventive Medicine, as well as by the Board of Internal Medicine and Pulmonary Disease. He has published and lectures frequently on addiction medicine topics.

Dr. Salsitz is a course director for ASAM sponsored Buprenorphine and REMS Opioid trainings, and is a lead mentor in the PCSS-MAT mentoring program. He has co-chaired the ASAM Review Course, the ASAM Common Threads Course, the ASAM State of the Art course and is a reviewer for the Journal of Addiction Medicine and Drug and Alcohol Dependence. He is the chair of the ASAM REMS course on safe and effective prescribing of opioids. Dr. Salsitz was the Co-chair of the ASAM CME committee and Chair of the New York Society of Addiction Medicine CME and Education committee.

Dr. Salsitz is a member of the medical advisory panel, for the New York State Office of Alcohol and Substance Abuse Services.
Dr. Salsitz is the recipient of the 2014 ASAM Annual Award, and the 2018 ASAM Annual Educator of the Year Award.

Sarah Bagley, MD, is an attending in the Departments of Medicine and Pediatrics at Boston Medical Center. Sarah completed a Combined Residency in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at Brown and then an Addiction Medicine Fellowship at Boston University. Her clinical and research interest are related to the impact of substance use on families and in the treatment of adolescents with substance use disorders.

Jeff Baxter, MD, is an Associate Professor of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Dr. Baxter completed a fellowship in Addiction Medicine at the Boston VA Medical Center, and is board certified in Family Medicine and Addiction Medicine. He currently serves as the Chief Medical Officer for Spectrum Health Systems Addiction Treatment Services, overseeing inpatient, outpatient and residential divisions.

Colleen LaBelle has certifications in addiction nursing and HIV with over 20 years of clinical experience in HIV and addiction, and co-authored a publication in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, “Treating Homeless Opioid Dependent Patients with Buprenorphine in an Office-based Setting." She was instrumental in the start up of the OBOT Program in the BMC Primary Care Clinic, which manages over 450 active patients with buprenorphine. This program provides buprenorphine treatment for patients in primary care, homeless, HIV, Family Medicine, OB, and support to the affiliated community health centers. She is the program director of the STATE OBOT B (State Technical Assistance, Treatment Expansion of Buprenorphine) working with 14 community health centers implementing a nurse care manager model for the expansion of buprenorphine. Since 2003, Ms. LaBelle has served as Faculty for the buprenorphine certification course of the American Society of Addiction Medicine. She frequently gives presentations on buprenorphine and provides consultation and technical assistance on- and offsite and by telephone. She oversees the MDPH buprenorphine list-serve and provides liaison for MDPH supported buprenorphine training, education and start-up in Massachusetts. She speaks on a local and national level, and has been a part of the SAMHSA Summit on Buprenorphine. Ms. LaBelle has served as a member of the Scientific Study (Study Section) Review Committee for the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Since 2004, she has served on the National Advisory Committee on Buprenorphine for the Health Resources and Services Administration and participated in professional editing of TAP 30 Technical Assistance Publication for Nurses with SAMHSA, 2009. Co-author : Five Year Experience with Collaborative Care of Opioid Addicted Patients using Buprenorphine in Primary Care, published Archives of Internal Medicine. In May 2011 she was the recipient of Individual Leadership Award, for Innovation In Health Care from MA Bureau of Substance Abuse Services as well as a NIATX award recipient 2011 Innovations in Behavioral Health Services award for Process Improvements. She is a board member of the Addiction Nurses Certification Board, and recently started a MA Chapter for addiction nurses.

Sharon Levy, MD, MPH is a board certified Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrician and an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.  She is the Director of the Adolescent Substance use and Addiction Program (ASAP) in the Division of Developmental Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital. She has evaluated and treated thousands of adolescents with substance use disorders, and has taught national curricula and published extensively on the outpatient management of substance use disorders in adolescents, including screening and brief advice in primary care, the use of drug testing and the outpatient management of opioid dependent adolescents. 

Dr. Lum is a general internist and primary care physician, and Professor of Medicine in the HIV/AIDS Division in the University of California, San Francisco's Department of Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital. She is certified by the American Boards of Internal Medicine and Addiction Medicine.

Kelley Saia, MD, is an attending obstetrician in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Boston Medical Center and an Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Boston University School of Medicine.Dr. Saia received her medical degree from the University of Vermont, College of Medicine and completed her residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Boston Medical Center.

In addition to caring for women with general obstetrics and gynecologic issues, she is the director of Project RESPECT, Substance Use Disorder Treatment in pregnancy at Boston Medical Center. Project RESPECT has been caring for pregnant women with substance use disorder for over 30 years and Dr. Saia, established the first obstetric buprenorphine clinic in the greater Boston area in 2006. RESPECT cares for over 125 mother-baby pairs per year with a multidisciplinary team consisting of obstetricians, addiction medicine specialist, pediatrics, psychiatry, social work, lactation consultants and nursing. Dr. Saia is actively engaged in patient care QI, clinical and scientific research, community outreach and medical training.

Preceding his entry into psychiatry, Dr. Saxon completed an internal medicine internship and worked for 4 years as an emergency room physician. Subsequent to his general psychiatry residency at the University of Washington, Dr. Saxon has more than three decades of experience as a clinical and research addiction psychiatrist. Dr. Saxon is board certified with added qualifications in addiction psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. Dr. Saxon sits on the editorial boards of the journals, Drug and Alcohol Dependence and General Hospital Psychiatry and is section editor for substance use disorders for UpToDate. He is a lifetime Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, where he served from 2017-2019 as that organization’s Chair of the Council on Addiction Psychiatry, and a Fellow of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, as well as a member of College on Problems of Drug Dependence and of American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry.

Dr. Saxon’s current research work is supported by the VA, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and National Institute of Mental Health and involves pharmacotherapies and psychotherapies for alcohol, tobacco, and opioid use disorders, work in co-occurrence of substance use disorders and posttraumatic stress disorder, phenomenology and epidemiology of cannabis use, and treatment of substance use in primary care. He has more than 180 papers published in peer reviewed journals and has done numerous conference presentations.

Alexander Y. Walley, MD, MSc, is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine and a general internist and addiction medicine specialist at Boston Medical Center. He has been the director of the Grayken Addiction Medicine Fellowship program since 2011. His research focuses on the medical complications of substance use, specifically HIV and overdose. He provides primary care and office-based addiction treatment for patients with HIV at Boston Medical Center. He founded BMC’s inpatient Addiction Consult Service in 2015 and the Faster Paths low-barrier access clinic in 2016. He is the medical director for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s Opioid Overdose Prevention Program. Since 2007, the MDPH program has trained over 90,000 people in Massachusetts’s communities, including people at-risk for overdose and their social networks.