Teaching Opioid Use Disorder With an Asynchronous Residency Curriculum

Opioid use disorder (OUD) remains a critical public health concern, and primary care physicians are essential to its identification and treatment. However, many residency programs lack structured training in evidence-based behavioral and pharmacologic approaches to OUD. This study evaluated the impact of an asynchronous, video-based OUD curriculum on knowledge acquisition among first-year family medicine residents.

We used a quasi-experimental design to assess the feasibility and short-term impact of an OUD curriculum adapted from MedEdPORTAL. Twenty first-year residents completed the curriculum during a 2-week behavioral health rotation and were assessed using a 10-question pretest and a 20-question posttest. A control group of nine third-year residents completed only the posttest. All assessments were administered electronically. Due to anonymous response collection, pre- and posttest scores could not be matched. We used Mann-Whitney U tests to compare posttest scores between groups and pre- versus posttest scores within the intervention group. We also calculated effect sizes.

Residents who completed the curriculum demonstrated a significant increase in knowledge from pretest (median=7.0) to posttest (median=17.0), U=345.0, P<.001. A large effect size (r=0.62) indicated a substantial gain in knowledge following the curriculum.

An asynchronous OUD curriculum significantly improved resident knowledge and demonstrated comparable posttest performance to a control group of senior residents, suggesting noninferiority to traditional training approaches and supporting the curriculum's potential as a scalable educational model.