The redesigned Opioid Analgesia Tool Kit organizes essential, practical resources that aid clinicians in treating and managing patients on chronic opioid therapy. This user-friendly resource is framed around the NIPC® Critical Thinking Model for Chronic Opioid Therapy—your “roadmap” for key milestones associated with opioid prescribing.

Access the Opioid Analgesia Tool Kit

This brief, easy-to-use tool assesses pain intensity and function in older adults. The original tool (based on a 1-5 scale) and the modified tool (based on a 1-10 scale) use both subjective and objective components for assessment.

Download Functional Pain Scale

Download Modified Functional Pain Scale

Download Functional Pain Scale scoring

This easy-to-use worksheet delineates key components that should be included in each interaction with patients receiving chronic opioid therapy. Integrating these components into your practice can aid in optimizing analgesia for patients, safe and responsible use of opioid therapy, and ensuring compliance with state and federal regulations.

Two companion pieces for patients, Chronic Opioid Therapy: Preparing for Your Appointments and Chronic Opioid Therapy: Dos and Don’ts to Help Avoid Problems, are also available. These handouts, which have been reviewed by people with pain currently taking opioids, can help patients to prepare for follow-up medical appointments, use opioid therapy safely, and better communicate with healthcare providers.

Download Chronic Opioid Therapy Worksheet

Download Dos and Don’ts Handout

Download Preparing for Appointments Handout

This helpful tool will allow your patients to track their daily pain and activities to help you better understand triggers that might be causing their pain, and ensure that they are receiving adequate analgesia. Patients can indicate on the tracking log the time during the day when pain occurs, their pain level, and the type of activity that they were doing at pain onset. Patients can also indicate the time they took their pain medication, and the type of medication taken.

Download Pain and Activity Tracking Log

This brief, easy-to-use screening tool, which is administered during the initial clinical visit, enables the physician to determine a patient’s potential risk for developing aberrant behaviors when prescribed opioids for chronic pain. The ORT can either be self-administered or completed by the physician as part of the patient interview.

Download Opioid Risk Tool Overview

Download Self-Administered Patient Form

Download Physician Interview Form

This pain assessment tool facilitates the communication of pain severity especially in older patients and those with diminished cognitive capacity and difficulty with abstract thinking. The original tool, or the newer modified Iowa Pain Thermometer Scale version, can be used to assess pain intensity as well as to determine the effectiveness of pain treatments.

Download Pain Thermometer Scale Overview

Download Original Scale

Download Modified Scale

The 4-A's+ Chart Note is a brief, easy-to-use tool for assessing patients taking opioids. Based on the 4-A’s outcomes measurement model of analgesia, activities of daily living, adverse events, and aberrant drug-taking behaviors, the Chart Note expands the original model by adding the two categories of assessment and action plan. It offers physicians a routine tool for easily documenting a patient’s progress during opioid therapy.

Download 4-A’s+ Chart Note Overview

Download Chart Note Tool

In this short, 12-minute patient-focused video, Michael M. Moskowitz, MD, MPH, discusses the benefits and risks of using opioids to treat pain. It consists of 10 brief chapters that cover all aspects of opioid analgesia, from how and where opioids work in the body and expectations of treatment to the positive and negetive effects of these medications. Individual chapters outline the important differences between physical dependency, addiction, and diversion issues associated with opioid use. This video will help the busy practitioner establish common-sense rules for patients prescribed opioids.

To download the video, rightclick and choose "Save Target As."

Due to the length of this video, the file may take a few moments to download (this time will vary based on your connection speed). We thank you for your patience.

The Informed Consent is also available as a brief downloadable document in outline form that the physican can give to the patient for referral.

A short Informed Consent true/false posttest enables the physician to verify that the patient understands the risks and benefits of using opioids.

Copyright © Michael M. Moskowitz, MD, MPH

Download Informed Consent

Download Posttest

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