Prior to joining NOAA, LT Lahov served at the Bureau of Prisons from June 2021-April 2023. While there, she assumed leadership of the MAT program, providing sustained high quality and culturally competent care for patients with addiction disorders in a high-risk setting.  

As program lead, LT Lahov collaborated with local psychology and psychiatry staff to quantify the need for robust in-house MAT services and identify administrative gaps resulting in missed treatment opportunities and loss-to-follow-up.  LT Lahov used this data to streamline and redesign the local MAT program, increasing timely access to treatment.  As a part of this redesign, LT Lahov created standardized MAT documentation tools for use in the EMR, facilitating cross-departmental collaboration and follow-up.  She also created the WASABI score, a MAT risk stratification tool that was the first to consider the unconventional needs of incarcerated patients.  This tool allowed her to screen all incoming patients requesting treatment and rapidly initiate MAT when clinically indicated.  LT Lahov successfully implemented and scaled her re-designed MAT program, quadrupling local patient capacity in under 90 days (from January to April 2023).  Her skillful synthesis of harm reduction principles with the safety/security demands of correctional medicine resulted in a dramatic increase in the treatment of addiction disorders in the facility, addressing a previously unmet clinical need.  

In addition to her clinical care, LT Lahov also provided consultation services to other BOP institutions nationwide, sharing her strategies and lessons learned to increase MAT treatment rates across the agency.