Educating prescribers on the risks of overprescribing and alternatives to opioid medications for pain management can lead to fewer or lower dose opioid prescriptions, which, in turn, lessens a patient’s risks for addiction. Prescriber education is often conducted through in-person or online continuing medical education courses, or as part of the requirements for initial licensure or renewal of a professional license.
COSSAP supports activities that:
Implement education programs for prescribers on the risks of overprescribing, alternatives to opioids for acute pain, and recognizing the signs of addiction.
COSSAP grantees supporting prescriber education programs
The University of California, Davis (UC Davis) will work with the California Department of Justice and other partners to perform a rigorous evaluation of California’s new law mandating use of its prescription drug monitoring program. The evaluation will focus on effects of mandated PDMP use on prescribing patterns and health outcomes, including potential unintended consequences. UC Davis will work with the Northern California High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) to establish a foundational relationship between public health and law enforcement agencies. In particular, UC Davis will focus on exploring new data sources from law enforcement agencies to share with public health agencies about opioid supply and overdose. The goal is to develop protocols to predict opioid overdose and share information about supply disruptions with emergency departments, first responders, and other key agencies. UC Davis will also explore protocols for communicating directly with local emergency services directors.
The Philadelphia Department of Public Health Opioid Data Working Group will develop a comprehensive opioid epidemic data report to establish a baseline and monitor the epidemic, use data matched across departments to identify barriers and opportunities, establish use of real-time data such as the Overdose Detection Mapping Application Program (ODMAP) and hospital syndromic data to support a rapid response plan to surges in overdose, and establish an overdose death review team that will review, in depth, a smaller number of fatal opioid-related overdose cases to identify factors, including system-level failures, that may have contributed to the fatalities.
The University of Kentucky Research Foundation, on behalf of the Kentucky Injury Prevention and Research Center (KIPRC), a bona fide agent for the Kentucky Department for Public Health (DPH), will (1) develop an algorithm-based mechanism to identify high-volume, high-risk opioid prescribing specialty groups within a health-care system to provide actionable information to health-care leadership to initiate targeted education; (2) develop an algorithm to identify inpatients whose specific principal diagnoses increase the likelihood that they will receive opioid prescriptions upon discharge and during follow-up care; and (3) develop diagnosis-specific patient education materials to facilitate a health-care system intervention for inpatients with these diagnoses. The results will be disseminated by developing reports, peer-reviewed manuscripts, and a repository of developed and tested patient- and prescriber-oriented educational materials to facilitate replication in other health-care systems and settings.
