Implementation of Opioid Safety Dashboards and Associated Primary Care Clinicians' Attitudes and Usage

Primary care clinicians are increasingly using new technologies to improve safe opioid prescribing. One of these technologies is an opioid panel dashboard, which lists patient-level information and related opioid safety measures. This paper describes our experiences of implementing dashboards in 2 different settings and how clinicians used those dashboards and their associated attitudes and perceptions.

Two primary care programs, a single-site academic residency program [Highland Family Medicine (HFM)] and a multisite regional network [Primary Care Network (PCN)], incorporated opioid safety dashboards, differing in content and implementation strategies. We surveyed clinicians within the 2 programs in 2023 to understand how they used these dashboards and their associated attitudes and perceptions.

A total of 49 eligible clinicians responded to the survey. A total of 31% of HFM clinicians and 81% of PCN clinicians found the dashboard useful. Approximately half of HFM clinicians felt badly if they had patients above 90 MMEs. Almost all clinicians reported using the dashboard to make clinical decisions, most commonly prescribing intranasal naloxone. In addition, PCN clinicians reported tapering or stopping opioid or benzodiazepine prescriptions based on the dashboard data.

Dashboards can be an important tool to support safe opioid prescribing, but attention needs to be given to how clinicians view and interact with the dashboards. This is critical to ensure that the information presented in dashboards is both actionable and not misinterpreted.