Part 2: Best Practices for Prescribing Opioids in Primary Care

Target Audience
This activity is designed specifically for primary care clinicians, registered nurses, advanced practice registered nurses, pharmacists, and other members of the healthcare team.

Program Overview
While prescription opioid use continues to decline rapidly, opioid dispensing remains high in certain areas of the US, increasing the potential for opioid misuse, abuse, and addiction. Efforts to educate clinicians on opioid prescribing and comprehensive pain management remain essential to ensure that patients with pain are treated appropriately while mitigating potential risks. This CME/CE activity, which is Part 2 of a three-part series titled Tackling the Opioid Crisis: Strategies to Improve Best Practices and Patient Outcomes, will review multimodal approaches to pain management including pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic therapies, as well as ways to safely initiate and discontinue opioids when appropriate.

This activity meets most states’ requirements for opioid education and is fully compliant with the Opioid Analgesic Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) education requirement issued by the FDA in September 2018.

Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this activity, participants should be better able to:

Describe the components of a comprehensive treatment plan including goals of therapy, periodic assessment and monitoring, and interdisciplinary team care and referral
Summarize how to safely initiate therapy, modify the dosage, and discontinue use of opioid analgesics
Compare and contrast pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic methods to manage pain