Compass Opioid Stewardship Certificate Program

Course Overview

The Compass Opioid Stewardship Certificate Program (OPSS) supports eligible clinicians in improving opioid prescribing practices and increasing the use of evidence-based, non-opioid pain management strategies. Funded by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), this program is offered at no cost and provides a structured roadmap to guide clinicians through high-quality educational activities and practical tools.

The program includes:

Self-paced education modules
11-part Clinical Cases Podcast Series focused on managing legacy patients on long-term opioid therapy
On-demand Medication-Assisted Therapy (MAT) education
Evidence-based reading lists
Opioid Stewardship Toolkit, including templates, resources, and policy samples

Additional benefits for enrolled clinicians:

Access to clinician experts and risk-mitigation specialists for coaching and case review
Implementation support, including individualized practice guidance
Chart/documentation review
Monthly live Community of Practice sessions for shared learning and case discussion

Clinicians can participate in the full program or select the components that best meet their needs.

Physicians
Advanced Practice Clinicians

Donald Stader

Dr. Don Stader is a board-certified emergency and addiction medicine physician, who works at Swedish Medical Center and Lincoln Health in Colorado. Don is also the founder and Executive Director of The Naloxone Project. He is the founder and past chair of Colorado ACEP's Opioid Task Force, the Editor-in-Chief of COACEP's 2017 Opioid Prescribing & Treatment Guidelines, and the CO's CURE’s guidelines on pain control and opioid stewardship. Don served for over 2 years as the Senior Pain Management & Opioid Policy Physician Adviser for the Colorado Hospital Association and serves on multiple national and local committees addressing the opioid epidemic in Colorado and across the nation. He is the current chair of ACEP’s Pain & Addiction Management Section. He is the Medical Director of the Compass Opioid Stewardship Program, a nationwide initiative to improve pain control, prescribing habits, addiction treatment and opioid stewardship for primary care clinicians.

Rachael Duncan

Rachael Duncan, PharmD, BCPS, BCCP, is a Colorado-based clinical pharmacist board-certified in pharmacotherapy and critical care pharmacy. She has spent the past decade focused on policy, advocacy, and educational work surrounding opioid stewardship and addiction treatment at both the state and national level. Rachael is the Chief Clinical Officer of Epifluence, where she is Program Director of the Maternal Overdose Matters (MOMs+) Initiative and Associate Director of The Naloxone Project (TNP). She leads several educational and quality improvement initiatives focused on helping hospitals and health systems build addiction treatment infrastructure, with a special focus on rural and frontier communities. She is the author and editor of multiple state- and nation-wide guidelines around opioid stewardship, alternatives to opioids (ALTO) for pain management, and MOUD for addiction treatment, championed ALTO and MOUD across Colorado EDs with the Colorado Hospital Association, and published the first peer-reviewed paper on ALTOs in the ED. Rachael’s clinical experience is in ED and hospital pharmacy.

Joshua Blum

Josh Blum is a board-certified internist and addiction medicine physician who practiced at Denver Health and Hospital Authority in Denver, CO as the director of outpatient substance use disorder treatment. As an institutional quality officer, he led initiatives on pain and opioid management and chaired Denver Health’s pharmacy and therapeutics committee. He is a past president of the Colorado chapter of the American Society of Addiction Medicine and co-chair of the Provider Education Workgroup at the Colorado Consortium for Prescription Drug Abuse Prevention. He also serves on the boards of the Colorado Pain Society and the Harm Reduction Action Center. Dr. Blum attended Dartmouth College and the University of Southern California School of Medicine, then completed his medical residency at the University of Colorado.

Accreditation: This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Iowa Medical Society (IMS). Compass Healthcare Collaborative (Compass) is accredited by the IMS to provide continuing medical education for physicians.

Commercial Support: This Activity was developed without support from any ineligible company. *The ACCME defines ineligible companies as those whose primary business is producing, marketing, selling, re-selling, or distributing healthcare products used by or on patients. Note: The ACCME does not consider providers of clinical service directly to patients to be commercial interests – unless the provider of clinical services is owned, or controlled by, and ACCME defined ineligible company.

Disclosure: Compass adheres to the Standards for Integrity and Independence in Accredited Continuing Education. The content of this activity is not related to products or the business lines of an ACCME-defined ineligible company. Compass has identified, reviewed, and mitigated all conflicts of interest that speakers, authors, course directors, planners, peer reviewers, or relevant staff disclose prior to the delivery of any educational activity.