Policymakers and Payers

Pain Management and the Opioid Epidemic: Balancing Societal and Individual Benefits and Risks of Prescription Opioid Use

This guideline updates the state of the science on pain research, care, and education with a particular focus on informing the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) development of a formal method for incorporating individual and societal considerations into its risk-benefit framework for opioid approval and monitoring.

The FDA SOURCE Model

The primary objectives of the SOURCE (Simulation of Opioid Use, Response, Consequences, and Effects) model are threefold: help the FDA and other stakeholders identify high-impact opioid-related interventions, assess potential unanticipated consequences of potential policies, and identify needs for further research.

Margolis-FDA Workshop: Identifying Key Competencies for Opioid Prescriber Education

This was a two-day virtual public workshop (which can now be re-watched) that focused on identifying gaps in existing opioid prescriber education offerings and core competencies that should be included in educational content for opioid prescribers and other healthcare providers, including prescriber education under a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS).

Vital Signs: Drug Overdose Deaths, by Selected Sociodemographic and Social Determinants of Health Characteristics — 25 States and the District of Columbia, 2019-2020

This report describes changes in drug overdose death rates from 2019 to 2020, stratified by sex, age group, and race and ethnicity. In addition, it examines differences in circumstances surrounding drug overdose, and assesses differences in overdose death rates by county-level income inequality and availability of mental health treatment providers and providers of medications for opioid use disorder.