Rural-Urban Variation in Opioid Use Disorder Treatment Access Among Commercially Insured Children and Adolescents
Link
Date
04/2026
Description
Access to opioid use disorder (OUD) treatment is challenging for adolescents, as few treatment facilities and clinicians serve this population. This brief describes the health care received by rural and urban children (aged 0 to 11) and adolescents (aged 12 to 17) with OUD who are commercially insured, focusing on the number of health care visits and the distance they traveled to receive care.
Key Findings:
- Among children and adolescents aged 0-17 with an OUD diagnosis and covered by commercial insurance, in 2019, 9.8% lived in a rural county and 90.2% lived in an urban county.
- Urban children and adolescents with an OUD diagnosis had slightly more visits on average compared to rural children and adolescents (6.2 vs. 5.8, respectively), though there was no difference in median visits by geography (3.0 for both).
- Nurse practitioners and physician assistants provide more than twice as many visits proportionally to rural than urban children and adolescents (13.0% vs. 5.4%, respectively).
- Urban children and adolescents with OUD were more likely than rural children and adolescents with OUD to receive care from a specialist rather than primary care physician (20.0% vs. 17.5%, respectively) or a behavioral health provider (5.2% vs. 2.3%, respectively).
- Rural children and adolescents faced substantially greater travel burdens than urban children and adolescents. Mean and median one-way driving times were approximately twice as long for rural children and adolescents than for their urban peers (44.2 vs. 24.1 mean travel minutes for rural and urban enrollees, respectively).
Center
WWAMI Rural Health Research Center
Authors
Holly Andrilla, Lisa Garberson, Sara Woolcock, Janessa Graves