Technology-Assisted Prescription Opioid Safety Education (T-POSE)

Non-medical use of prescription opioids (NMPOU) can be generally defined as not taking opioids as prescribed, which could occur unintentionally or intentionally. In 2014, 4.3 million adults in the United States (U.S.) were estimated to engage in NMPOU (Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality 2014). Some patients may take a dose more frequently than prescribed because they were not receiving adequate pain relief from the prescribed dosage. While others may continue to take opioids longer than prescribed because their pain is persistent and/or they like the euphoric effects of opioids. According to a recently released Truven Health Analytics-NPR Health Poll, the majority (57%) of Americans have taken a prescription opioid and 35% of those had concerns (e.g., addiction, effectiveness, side effects) about prescription opioids. These findings suggest that while Americans are aware, some even concerned, of the potential dangers associated with prescription opioids that their utilization patterns continue to increase (Boddy 2017). Because opioids are prescribed by a physician, patients may believe that these medications are safe and they may be unaware of the risks associated with misuse and abuse of opioids. NMPOU may lead to increased risk of drug overdose, addiction, diversion and use of heroin. Many individuals with opioid use disorders initiated NMPOU before transitioning to heroin (Banerjee et al. 2016; Cerda et al. 2015) and report that their first exposure to an opioid was prescribed by a physician. This underscores the need for empirically-tested educational interventions that can potentially reduce NMPOU and diversion. Prescription opioids have an important role to play in health care and blanket policies to restrict access to prescription opioids are not appropriate, rather the hypothesis is that harm can be reduced by fundamentally changing our approach to opioid medication safety.