The Opioid Prescribing Improvement Guide is designed to help individual prescribers build safer opioid prescribing habits. The Improvement Guide can be used by prescribers to implement and document their quality improvement work and also by healthcare organizations as they build systems to support safer opioid prescribing practices.
The ICSI Postoperative Toolkit is focused specifically on the initial postoperative discharge and post-acute phase of opioid prescribing. It does not cover pain management while inpatient or in recovery. The toolkit can be used by the surgical team to improve safe opioid prescribing. It is designed as a companion document to the ICSI Opioid Prescribing Improvement Guide, 2020. This Toolkit replaces the Postoperative Call-to-Action documents and includes updated procedure-specific goals.
In 2016 ICSI was tasked by the leaders within the MN Health Collaborative to recommend community prescribing standards for first prescriptions for acute pain in common settings like primary care clinics, emergency departments, postoperative facilities and dental clinics. Members of the MN Health Collaborative also focused within their own organizations on the management of those patients who had been prescribed opioids on a long-term basis. This work included clinical and implementation recommendations, as well as sharing promising practices and outcomes to improve safe opioid prescribing.
With the advent of the pandemic it became clear that physicians and providers needed a way to implement these recommendations themselves. As opioid addiction rates continue to rise in a startling fashion, they had to implement these standards in a way that engaged not only the physicians and caregivers, but families and of course patients as well. These tools were designed to meet that need.