Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) has developed a new smartphone application that it hopes will help clinicians learn how to more appropriately prescribe and better manage opioid medications.

The app, QuizTime, sends participating clinicians a daily pain management scenario and asks them to provide answers pertaining to the opiate or non-opiate-based therapies that should be pursued, reported Health Data Management‘s Greg Slabodkin.

Trials at VUMC have been successful enough that the Tennessee Dept. of Health has taken interest; it recently began a partnership with Vanderbilt to offer QuizTime free to providers throughout the state.

“When it comes to opioid prescribing, you can put alerts into the electronic health record that pop up recommending non-opioid therapies,” explained Dr. Matt McEvoy, a VUMC anesthesiologist and one of the project’s leads. “That might condition people to take certain actions, but they may not know why.”

“This method works and is based on several learning theories,” he said. “Instead of having people attend a traditional didactic lecture setting, we take that same amount of content and space it out over time in a smaller package.”

The approach, McEvoy asserted, results in better learning retention and (researchers hope) will ultimately lead to safer care management.

Get the full story here, from Health Data Management.