Evaluation of a Nurse-Led Program for Rural Pregnant Women With Opioid Use Disorder to Improve Maternal-Neonatal Outcomes.

Objectives: To generate effect sizes of preliminary program outcomes and identify areas for program improvement related to a nurse-led, community-based screening, referral, and advocacy program for women with perinatal opioid use disorder (OUD): the Engaging Mothers for Positive Outcomes with Early Referrals (EMPOWER) program.

Design: We extracted outcomes retrospectively from medical records for the first 19 mother-newborn dyads who participated in the program (postintervention group). We compared these outcomes with those of 19 randomly selected mother-newborn dyads in which mothers had perinatal OUD and received care before the program launch (preintervention group).