According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, someone dies every 12 minutes from an opioid overdose in America. With more than 130 related deaths per day, there is no doubt that the opioid epidemic has become a national crisis.
Opioids prescribed to address pain from workplace injuries can often open the door to addiction, abuse, and all of the associated health risks. Associate professor of medicine at the University of Connecticut, William Shaw is principal investigator on a US Department of Labor project to address the opioid crisis through the lens of workers’ compensation.
In partnership with the US Department of Labor’s Chief Evaluation Office and the Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs, Shaw and a team from Mathematica, a policy research firm, will identify management strategies that are particularly applicable to payers and organizations administering workers’ compensation benefits.
The study will analyze policies adopted at the federal, state, and private level including insurance companies, health care provider systems, pharmacy benefit managers, and so on. The research team will identify effective approaches to, hopefully, alleviate the opioid crisis stemming from workplace injuries.
“While many policy changes have been enacted to change opioid prescribing practices in the past few years, it is important to know which policies are actually affecting provider practices and patient outcomes. We hope to learn more through this research project,” says Shaw.
Shaw and Mathematica will generate new evidence in this field to inform the development of effective interventions for opioid prescription and management for workplace injuries. They will also establish research questions and conduct analyses to shed further light on promising approaches to track, manage, and guide opioid prescribing in workers’ compensation programs.
In its early stages, the project team convened a technical working group of experts in occupational medicine, insurance, workers’ compensation policy, and pharmacy to review the project plan and to identify critical policy questions and data sources for their analyses.
The results of this research will aid in the efforts to reduce and ideally end the opioid crisis. Their findings will be reported and disseminated through presentations and briefings, which will allow for these techniques to be duplicated and reproduced throughout the world.
William Shaw is the chief of the Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine in UConn’s School of Medicine. He received his PhD in clinical psychology from San Diego State University. Shaw is a clinical psychologist and engineer with more than 20 years of research experience in occupational health and safety research. His research focuses on pain and work disability, with an emphasis on improving occupational and health outcomes and preventing work disability among workers who are ill, injured, or experiencing episodic symptoms. Currently, Shaw is working on a system-level early return-to-work study with insurers and health care providers in Connecticut and testing of a clinic-based screening and early intervention protocol for work-related low back pain.
