The Opioid Epidemic is a multi-faceted problem, and isn’t going to be solved by just one thing, but taking unused mediations of the street will help a little.
April 28th 2018 is the DEA’s National Prescription Drug Take Back Day, which last year resulted in the take back of nearly one million pounds of drugs. (Last year there were 4223 participating Law Enforcement Groups participating nationwide. In my state alone, Washington Sate, there were 56, with a total of 67 collection sites.)
Does your healthcare organization have a strategy in place and leverage this day?
This is a perfect opportunity for regional healthcare organizations to leverage both their digital platform AND physical platform to encourage medication disposal, as they highlight opioid overdose awareness in the month of April.
A few examples of how:
- Simple flyers showing map to the disposal facilities along with open-close times given out at reception the week of April 23 – April 28, along with catchy T-Shirts for the receptionists. ( most of these disposal sites operate throughout the year, so this is also a golden opportunity to share this information too!)
- Create a simple, FUN YouTube Video ( ie no talking head Doctor Videos ), post it on your corporate Facebook, AND have your CEO ask your all of your employees via EMAIL to repost this video to their personal Facebook page. (As an aside, this would be a perfect video for a CEO to participate in)
- Use your website’s homepage to post content leading up to this day; even consider a default overlay on the homepage for one week on the homepage, so that every visitor to your website’s homepage first sees it as the default.
- Talk ( ie in person or by phone !) to the other regional healthcare organizations and partners to coordinate this effort – ie local hospitals, local county health departments, statewide medical organizations and local newspapers. Personally offer to aggressively share each other’s content about this on your YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter account, and see if they will reciprocate.
- A video or other content, per the FDA, about which opioid based medications are safe to flush
Look, I won’t bother you with the details about CEO out-degree centrality, in degree centrality, and eigenvector centality (a fancy way of measure of connectivity within a network), and the theory behind how this relates to digital public-private partnerships.
Suffice it to say that every healthcare organization is sitting on a complex, dual network that is both digital and physical, and by the CEO or the COO understanding this network – particularly how the human component interacts with the digital component – they can fundamentally (and very inexpensively, for the cost of a few phone calls) change its architecture so it can change people’s behavior, in this case medication disposal.