Enhancing Pharmacist Involvement in Care - Medically Assisted Treatment for Opioid Dependence (EPIC-MATOD) implementation-effectiveness study.
Principal Investigators: Kirsty Morgan (Peninsula Health), Prof Suzanne Nielsen (MARC)
Co-researchers: John Jackson (Centre for Medicine Use and Safety), Sarah Lord (Harm
Reduction Victoria) ,Dr David Jacka (Monash Health), A/Professor Dennis Petrie (Centre for
Health Economics), Dr Ali Cheetham (MARC)
The Enhancing Pharmacist Involvement in Care for Medication Assisted Treatment of Opioid
Dependence (‘EPIC-MATOD’) project was initiated in 2020 to explore how to better utilise
the pharmacist workforce to improve access to MATOD. To leverage the role of community
pharmacists, a collaborative model of care was co-designed with input from clinical experts,
peak professional bodies, and consumer organisations.
The EPIC-MATOD implementation study aimed to determine the clinical effectiveness,
feasibility, and acceptability of the EPIC-MATOD model. In total, 13 pharmacists and four
prescribers recruited from the south eastern suburbs of Melbourne provided collaborative
care to 36 patients over a 6-month period, with outcomes compared to a non-randomised
comparison group of 49 patients receiving MATOD via usual practice.
Results supported the hypothesis that pharmacist-led collaborative care could provide
comparable clinical outcomes to usual care (with 97.2% of collaborative care patients
retained in treatment compared to 89.8% in the comparison arm), and was associated with
significant increases in treatment satisfaction and quality adjusted life years (QALYs).
Interviews with pharmacists, prescribers and patients supported that collaborative care was
feasible and acceptable, with high levels of support from all three groups. A health
economics assessment found the model was cost-effective compared to treatment as usual.
Work is now underway to support national scale-up of the model, through developing and
testing co-designed implementation strategies to facilitate uptake of collaborative care in
other geographic regions of Australia where similar treatment barriers exist.
Project Funders
The pilot study was funded through the Victorian Department of Health through an Alcohol
and Drug Research Innovation Agenda (ADRIA) Research Grant.
Project Partners
A collaboration between MARC, Peninsula Health, Frankston Mornington Peninsula Primary
Care Partnership, Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, Royal Australian College of General
Practitioners, Harm Reduction Victoria, Pharmacy Guild, Australian Medical Association,
Area 4 Pharmacotherapy Network and Frankston Council.
Publications
Nielsen, S., Graham, F., Hadi, M.H., Grist, E., Rowland, B., Jackson, J., Lord, S., Dostal J.,
Wood, P., Morgan, K., Petrie, D., Cheetham, A. (2026). A multisite implementation-efficacy trial of
a pharmacist-led model of collaborative care for Medication Assisted Treatment for Opioid
Dependence: Outcomes of the EPIC-MATOD trial. Research in Social and Administrative Pharmacy, 22(2), 292-310. DOI: 10.1016/j.sapharm.2025.10.009
Nielsen, S, Cheetham, A, Jackson, J, Lord, S, Petrie, D, Jacka, D, Picco, L, & Morgan,
K. (2021). A prospective, multisite implementation-efficacy trial of a collaborative prescriber-
pharmacist model of care for Medication Assisted Treatment for Opioid Dependence:
Protocol for the EPIC-MATOD study. Research in Social and Administrative
Pharmacy, 18(8), 3394-3401. DOI: 10.1016/j.sapharm.2021.11.007
Cheetham, A, Morgan, K, Jackson, J, Lord, S, & Nielsen, S. (2022). Informing a
collaborative-care model for delivering medication assisted treatment for opioid dependence
(MATOD): An analysis of pharmacist, prescriber and patient perceptions. Research in Social
and Administrative Pharmacy (In Press). DOI: 10.1016/j.sapharm.2022.09.009
Grist, E., Cheetham, A., Jackson, J., Wood, P., Lord, S., Pricolo, A., Armstrong, F., Morgan,
K., Nguyen, C., Tran, T. and Nielsen, S. (2024), Clinical effectiveness of pharmacist
administration of long-acting injectable buprenorphine: Findings from the EPIC-MATOD
study. Drug Alcohol Rev., 43: 1856-1858. https://doi.org/10.1111/dar.13856