A Health and Human Services (HHS) report by RAND that presents findings from a scoping study to assess the types of data sources and data-linkage efforts that are currently being used or could potentially be leveraged to support research and evaluations to combat the opioid crisis. Alternative pain management, overdose prevention, and prevention/treatment/recovery strategies are addressed. Secondary data sources are also discussed that are relevant to opioid research. 

This report summarizes presentations and discussions that took place during a public workshop examining the use of in-home drug disposal systems, with a focus on removing unused opioid analgesics from the home. This document highlights different types of drug disposal and initiatives targeting unused opioid analgesics. 

In this academic paper, the Appalachian region of Eastern Kentucky, which has been disproportionately affected by the opioid crisis, was used as the context for a healthcare hackathon, run by MIT Hacking Medicine, to create grassroots healthcare innovation ideas through a systematic design thinking process, yielding numerous novel strategies, such as mobile applications and community health programs.

Using grassroots entrepreneurship, the hackathon democratized the process of innovation by shifting the resources and onus of resolving the public challenge from the institutional level to the average citizen. Citizens were selected through an application process among Eastern Kentucky residents that had been impacted first-hand by the opioid crisis.  

This is a report from the Prevention Institute that provides information on how to use the Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience (ACE|R) Framework to plan community responses to the opioid crisis, with a focus on community prevention. This is an especially relevant framework for communities that have experienced social and economic decline. 

This is an academic paper that examined how different types of messaging could change perceptions on disposing of unused opioid medications. Messaging including young children that pictorially demonstrate how to dispose of medications may have the greatest impact on medication disposal. Findings can be used to inform community-based campaigns.

This academic paper addresses the fact that many currently employed interventions (prescriber guidelines, prescription monitoring programs, naloxone rescue) address the prevention of OUD or downstream complications but not treatment of the underlying disorder itself.

An OUD Cascade of Care framework could help structure local and national efforts to combat the opioid crisis by identifying key targets, interventions, and quality indicators across populations and settings to achieve these ends. Improved data collection and reporting methodology will be imperative.

This is an academic paper that describes the development of a survey that assesses community readiness to address prescription opioid misuse. Interventions can be ineffective in communities that are disinterested in change, so it is important to utilize interventions that are specific to the community’s level of readiness given that coalitions will have limited resources and stakeholders will have diverse agendas. The entire survey is available as an appendix in the paper. 

This toolkit from the Kentucky Injury Prevention and Research Center helps stakeholders select and implement prevention programs in their communities. It describes successful program models for both substance use prevention and overdose prevention. 

This issue brief describes the increasing incidence of deaths in local jails, often by suicide in the days immediately after arrest, and analyzes the underlying causes such as untreated substance use and mental health disorders. It recommends strategies to reduce these deaths, including better screening for suicide risk and mental health problems, pre-jail diversion into appropriate treatment, and greater access to treatment while incarcerated.

This paper outlines the impact of an educational program aimed towards decreasing stigma around opioid use disorder and medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD). The authors trained health science graduate students to present on the opioid crisis and the usefulness of MOUD to community members. The results indicate that they were successful in increasing knowledge acquisition and improving attitudes towards MOUD. 

This is a report which describes how to develop a more coordinated and comprehensive health education system in regards to opioid use disorder. The report provides information on the current health professional education environment and also a survey of its regulations. The literature review specifically focuses on the education of medical professionals involved in pain management and the substance use disorder workforce. 

This is an academic paper that examined an intervention that provided caregivers of patients in a pediatric emergency department education on safe medication storage and disposal as well as a lock box. Findings show that, at baseline, very few caregivers engaged in safe medication storage and disposal, but, after the intervention, a large majority (90%) used the lock box.