Inside Health Care #46: Dr. Daniel Alford on Safer/Competent Opioid Prescribing Education (SCOPE) of Pain Program

September 8, 2020 · Lawrence Green

In this episode of Inside Health Care, Dr. Daniel Alford, Professor of Medicine at Boston University and Director of Safer/Competent Opioid Prescribing Education (SCOPE) of Pain Program chats with Lawrence Green, NCQA Communications Specialist about the SCOPE of Pain Program. SCOPE of Pain is a series of continuing medical education/continuing nursing education activities designed to help health care professionals safely and effectively manage patients with acute and/or chronic pain, when appropriate, with opioid analgesics.

Dr. Alford discusses the inception, goals, focus, and target audience of SCOPE of Pain. Dr. Alford chats about how SCOPE of Pain has evolved to train over 190,000 health care providers and how COVID-19 has affected training efforts. Dr. Alford also talks about managing patients who are currently on long-term opioids and/or high dose opioids and barriers to opioid prescribing today.

Don’t forget to check out NCQA’s upcoming Quality Innovation Series, which features talks and seminars from over 50 health care experts, live and on-demand September 17 – December 4.