Medication Assisted Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder in Pregnancy

Release Date: 2/3/23

Expire Date: 7/31/24

This virtual educational activity is jointly provided by the Connecticut Hospital Association and the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services

Target audience:  Physicians, nurses, social workers, quality professional, risk managers, healthcare executives and all healthcare professionals working with women and families affected by trauma and addiction.

Description: This educational activity will review the epidemiology of substance abuse in reproductive-aged women.  We will address current medication assisted therapies used in pregnancy for women with a history of opioid addiction and their impact on neonatal outcomes.

Learning Objectives:

At the conclusion of this activity, participants should be better able to:

• Discuss how to assess and manage pregnant and lactating women with substance use
• Explain how to develop a reasonable treatment plan for pregnant and postpartum patients with substance use

Your Faculty:

Audrey Merriam, MD is an attending physician and Assistant Professor in the department of Maternal-Fetal Medicine at Yale University and the Associate Residency Program Director for the Obstetrics and Gynecology Residency Program.  Originally from upstate New York, she has never been able to break out of the east coast.  After graduating from St. Lawrence University in 2006 Dr. Merriam attended medical school at the University of Vermont in Burlington, VT and completed the majority of her clinical rotations at Maine Medical Center in Portland, ME.  She completed her residency training in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Christiana Care Health System in Delaware and her Maternal-Fetal Medicine fellowship at Columbia University in NYC.  While at Columbia she obtained a master’s degree in Biostatistics.   During this time, Dr. Merriam has served on the boards for the Junior Fellow Advisory Council for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Society of Maternal-Fetal Medicine.  Dr. Merriam is currently the co-chair of the formed Maternal Mortality Review Committee for the state of Connecticut. 

Ariadna Foray, MD is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine. She received her B.A. in neuroscience from Bryn Mawr and her M.D. from Harvard. During her psychiatry residency training at Yale, she joined the Neuroscience Research Training Program and studied the impact of pregnancy, PTSD and pregnancy-specific anxiety on stress reactivity and arousal using the affect modulation of the acoustic startle reflex. Following residency, she joined the faculty at Yale and was awarded funding through the competitive Clinician Scientist Training Program (K12) and focused her research on the development of novel treatments for perinatal substance use. She is the Director of the Center for Wellness of Women and Mothers, a reproductive psychiatry research program. As a principal investigator and co-investigator on several NIH-funded grants, she has developed and implemented addiction treatment interventions, successfully recruited pregnant women with substance use disorders for participation in clinical research and collaborated with researchers and clinicians across disciplines. As part of her clinical work, Dr. Forray is a consultation-liaison psychiatrist at Yale New Haven hospital and the interim Chief of the Psychological Medicine Section. She is also the Psychiatry Director of the interdisciplinary Adult Sickle Cell Program and is one of the few psychiatrists in the U.S. with expertise in mental health issues in patients with sickle cell disease.