Six Building Blocks: A Team-Based Approach to Improving Opioid Management in Primary Care

Self-Service How-To Guide

This guide is a step-by-step approach, designed to support clinics as they independently implement effective, guideline-driven care for their patients with chronic pain who are using opioid therapy. While anyone can use these materials to implement improvements in opioid management, it is specifically written for quality improvement personnel and project managers to use in guiding an improvement team and care teams through the Six Building Blocks implementation process.

The Six Building Blocks and this How-To Guide serve as an evidence-based roadmap or implementation blueprint to guide opioid management processes by addressing six key areas:

Providing leadership support.
Revising and aligning clinic policies, patient agreements, and workflows.
Tracking and monitoring the population of patients using long-term opioid therapy.
Engaging in planned, patient-centered visits.
Identifying resources for complex patients.
Measuring success.

The University of Washington, Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute, and Abt Associates collaborated to create this guide to help quality improvement personnel or project managers in clinics lead a team in making opioid management improvements without external support. This guide will be evaluated as part of a study funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality under Contract No. HHSP233201500013I. The final version of the guide will be available at the conclusion of the study (anticipated early 2021).