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. The opioid epidemic continues to plague Indianapolis and the rest of the state. With the rise in opioid misuse, there has been a parallel surge in pregnant women with opioid use disorder. Infants born to opioid-dependent mothers are at a high risk for Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome. NAS, which results from babies experiencing withdrawal from opioids once they leave the womb, leads to dehydration and poor weight gain, vomiting, tremors, irritability, high-pitched crying and seizures. With the rise of opioid epidemic, the incidence of NAS nationwide tripled from 1999 to 2013. NAS is becoming so common […]