In recent years, the addiction and abuse of prescription opioids has reached an epidemic level in the U.S. This epidemic worsens health, drains productivity, and procreates crime. As a result, communities suffer significant direct and indirect losses. Given this public health emergency, immediate actions are required to make communities resilient against the opioid addiction epidemic.

This project aims to strengthen community resilience to combat the opioid crisis through a two-pronged approach:

  1. Developing a risk assessment tool to help physicians generate personalized opioid prescriptions for patients, which will help reduce the flow of opioids and minimize a patient’s probability of addiction and overdose.
  2. Designing an incentive distribution model for prescription opioid users to return unused pills and minimize the use of prescription opioids by secondary users.

The objective is to initially implement this approach in Massachusetts and later expand it to other highly afflicted states.

Project Principal Investigators