The COVID-19 pandemic and its associated challenges should cause us to redouble community efforts to address both unfamiliar and ongoing problems related to SUD in Marion County.

Alex Cohen is the Director of Learning and Evaluation for the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. A patient visits a doctor. He suffers from chronic pain. In fact, he’s been suffering for a while, and he’s been receiving painkillers for months. And recently, he’s been upping his dosage and visiting multiple doctors to get enough. But the doctor he’s seeing today doesn’t know this. If she knew about his prescription history, she might engage him in a conversation about his opioid use, suggest alternative pain remedies or even refer him to substance abuse treatment. Instead, she writes him a prescription, and he leaves. Making patients’ opioid prescription histories readily accessible to […]