Northeast Ohio Hospital Opioid Consortium Launches Innovative Prescriber Education Tool

The Northeast Ohio Hospital Opioid Consortium, a program of The Center for Health Affairs, is taking its educational content to a new, innovative platform with the launch of its next course for prescribing clinicians. Powered by QuizTime, this course delivers daily questions to subscribers’ phone or email that can be completed in just a few minutes each day.

Funded through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Overdose Data to Action grant, the course is free of charge to enrollees. It is designed for prescribing clinicians, including physicians, advanced practice registered nurses and physician assistants. Continuing education credits are offered for participants through Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Designed for prescribing clinicians in both inpatient and outpatient settings, the course consists of 20 scenario-based, multiple-choice questions delivered daily, or at whatever frequency the learner chooses. Topics covered by the course include:

• Destigmatizing medication-assisted therapy.
• How to refer patients for treatment services.
• How to screen for opioid use disorder.
• Strategies to decrease the prescription of dangerous combinations of medications and increase the rate of prescription of non-opioid analgesics.

QuizTime is a unique tool for delivering education developed by the Center for Advanced Mobile Healthcare Learning at Vanderbilt University Medical Center whose mission is create an approach to lifelong learning in healthcare that is effective, responsive, relevant, and easily accessible with the ultimate goal of improving patient and population health. Studies using QuizTime’s spaced, retrieval-based approach to learning have shown superior knowledge retention and sustained performance improvement in continuing medical education settings. The QuizTime course catalog is continually growing and currently includes approximately 30 offerings covering a wide variety of clinical topics, half of which are specifically geared toward responsible opioid prescribing and stewardship.

“The Center for Health Affairs is thrilled to partner with the Center for Advanced Mobile Healthcare Learning to be make this inventive new platform available to prescribers in Ohio,” said Amy Terry, director of The Center for Health Affairs Northeast Ohio Hospital Opioid Consortium. “The tool is easy to use and enables prescribers to access education in a convenient and creative new way. As opioid and polysubstance abuse in this country continues to threaten our communities, this education is a critical component of the Opioid Consortium’s strategy for combatting the crisis.”

This course is the latest addition to a compendium of coursework developed by the Opioid Consortium. Additional offerings through a more traditional web-based learning platform include four modules for nurses, along with one each for healthcare support staff and for prescribing clinicians. Together, these courses are aimed at advancing the Opioid Consortium’s goals around professional education in order to most effectively provide care for patients with opioid and other substance use disorders. More information on the Northeast Ohio Hospital Opioid Consortium’s educational offerings, including this new course, is available at opioidconsortium-education.org.

About The Center for Health Affairs

As the nation’s first regional hospital association, The Center for Health Affairs serves as the collective voice and leading advocate for 38 hospitals across 10 counties in Northeast Ohio. Dating back over 100 years, The Center aims to enhance the effectiveness of the healthcare community and the health of the communities it serves by providing expertise, resources and solutions to address the challenges currently being faced by the region’s healthcare providers. The Center’s efforts focus on areas in which member hospitals and their communities can benefit from a regional approach, including emergency preparedness; public policy and advocacy; finance and reimbursement; and community health. Learn more at neohospitals.org.