NQF Issues Guidance on Opioid Prescribing Practices

The National Qualify Forum (NQF) recently released new guidelines to support safe and appropriate opioid prescribing to manage patients’ pain, entitled “National Quality Partners Playbook: Opioid Stewardship.” This marks the latest in the growing number of organizations providing input on strategies for addressing the opioid epidemic and helping to shape potential policy changes and federal and state level investments under consideration. 

Developed with input from over forty experts and national stakeholders from the public and private sectors, the guidance identifies several fundamental actions to support sustainable opioid stewardship programs, including:

1. Promoting leadership commitment and culture, including allocating resources and support from organizational leaders.
2. Implementing organizational policies to support evidence-based approaches to multimodal pain management.
3. Advancing clinical knowledge, expertise, and practice to ensure clinicians are trained in and understand the science of pain, evidence-based pain management strategies, and patient communication techniques.
4. Enhancing patient and family caregiver education and engagement so they are fully informed about risks and benefits of appropriate pain management options and are active participants in decisions about pain management plans.
5. Tracking, monitoring, and reporting performance data on opioid prescribing, patient-reported outcomes, adverse events, and the use of prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) to identify opportunities for improvement and assess the impact of opioid stewardship efforts.
6. Establishing accountability to articulate clear expectations for creating, promoting, and maintaining a culture of opioid stewardship.
7. Supporting collaboration with community leaders and stakeholders to achieve maximum impact.

In addition to those actions, the Playbook also includes examples and strategies to implement the steps, including creating education materials on pain management options or identify specific team members who can review costs and insurance coverage with patients for pain management options. 

The NQP Playbook encourages healthcare organizations to develop realistic measurement strategies to assess key areas such as clinician prescribing patterns, adherence to best practices, and the use of non-pharmacologic pain management options. It also identifies important drivers of change that can impact and advance opioid prescribing patterns—including licensure, education, accreditation, payment, reimbursement, workforce management, and the use and integration of prescription drug monitoring programs into electronic health records—and urges federal entities, accreditation agencies, and partners in quality improvement to support action in these areas.

“The NQP Playbook provides a blueprint to help address the nation’s devastating opioid epidemic,” said Shantanu Agrawal, MD, MPhil, president and CEO of NQF. “It is a critically important tool for our nation’s frontline clinicians as they consider pain management strategies with patients.”

The full document is available for paid download here. NQF will host a public webinar on opioid stewardship on March 29 and a fully accredited, one-day workshop on May 1 for clinicians and healthcare quality leaders to learn about implementing the NQP Playbook.

In addition to the NQP Playbook, NQF also released a new guide to improve shared decision making between patients and clinicians, the NQP Playbook™: Shared Decision Making in Healthcare. This guide offers direction for communication between clinicians and patients as they work together to make healthcare decisions, including strategies to manage pain.