Opioid Stewardship Accelerator

CaroNova launched the Opioid Stewardship Accelerator (OSA) in 2022 to support hospitals and health systems responding to the devastating opioid epidemic that persists across the Carolinas. The OSA is ultimately intended to catalyze the communitywide collaboration and systems changes necessary to improve health outcomes.

To this end, we’ve launched a new centralized online library of strategies, tools, and resources to accelerate health systems’ adoption of opioid use disorder (OUD) prevention, treatment, and recovery best practices. The CaroNova Opioid Library (https://opioidlibrary.caronova.org/), co-designed with experts across North Carolina and South Carolina, offers access to best practices and allows health systems to adopt these life-saving interventions.

Health systems can play a large part in curbing this epidemic. They, along with local communities in the Carolinas, have been working diligently on wide-ranging solutions to address the opioid crisis. This new online opioid resource repository establishes an easy, accessible central library housing useful and effective resources from national, state, and local organizations for hospitals. Implementation support can be requested through a form on the website and will help hospitals in the Carolinas adopt opioid stewardship best practices.

Our CaroNova team has worked with subject matter experts (SME) from across the Carolinas to co-design a process to extensively review, vet, and finalize the content and materials for the resource library. A group of opioid SMEs, including people with lived experience, were key collaborative partners in bistate meetings to codesign both the library and the coaching model. The participating SMEs were from the following organizations:

“We got involved in this project because we wanted to share the best practices that have been effective in our health system and to learn from others in the Carolinas about how we can better prevent and treat opioid use disorder,” said Dr. Constance Guille, Professor, and Director of the Women’s Reproductive Behavioral Health Division at the Medical University of South Carolina.

“The entire healthcare community is trying to find the best solutions to manage the devastating impact of the opioid epidemic and to address emerging problems such as fentanyl-related overdoses and deaths. This repository of resources creates a space for best practices to be shared and scaled across the .”

Now that the library has been developed and launched, the team will begin providing coaching and implementation support for health systems to ensure library resources are utilized to achieve maximum impact. The team will also help health systems be change agents in their communities to improve the underlying systems, policies, and cross-sector collaborations that will advance behavioral health and overall health outcomes for their patients.

The next two years of this project focus on implementation coaching and support – provided through CaroNova’s state technical assistance teams – for hospitals to easily access and implement the available tools that best fit their needs. Simplified resource access and ground support will help hospitals change their opioid stewardship and treatment practices to tangibly improve patient outcomes.

CaroNova is discussing these implementation efforts with potential technical assistance partners. Our next steps to provide targeted assistance to health systems include:

• • Disseminate and increase the visibility of the Opioid Library

  • Assess site analytics to understand the most utilized resources and respond to ad hoc technical assistance requests submitted from health systems in the Carolinas

  • Host educational webinars about select tools and strategies

  • Provide one-on-one coaching with a select group of hospitals

  • Monitor and evaluate project success metrics

In addition, the resources in the Opioid Library will align with and complement state opioid settlement strategies so that hospitals using these resources are well-positioned to benefit from state and local initiatives and successfully address this persistent community health issue. The Opioid Library displays a special state icon to flag the resources that are associated with the state settlement fund strategies.

CaroNova will continually update the site to disseminate relevant information and tools for clinicians treating opioid use disorder.