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 […]

Alex Cohen is the Director of Learning and Evaluation for the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. In Indiana and across the United States, the opioid epidemic continues, with drug overdose deaths involving opioids exceeding 47,000 nationwide in 2017. To help stem the tide, the federal government allocated $11 billion to states in fiscal years 2017 and 2018, according to a recently released report from the Bipartisan Policy Center. In Indiana, which received $159 million in federal opioid funding, this funding has been deployed by the state to strengthen prevention, treatment and recovery efforts and to support research and programs in the criminal justice system. At first glance, Indiana’s portion of federal […]