March 20, 2015
Traci Green, PhD, MSc
Deputy Director, Boston Medical Center Injury Prevention Center, Boston University Medical Center
Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine, Boston University Medical Center
Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine and Epidemiology, The Warren Alpert School of Medicine, Brown University
About the Presentation: The epidemic of prescription opioid abuse and overdose in the US has prompted numerous policy and treatment innovations. In one state highly impacted by prescription opioid abuse and related challenges of emergency department overutilization, complementary and alternative therapies (chiropractic, massage therapy, and acupuncture) were extended to Rhode Island Medicaid recipients living with chronic pain overutilizing emergency department services. This talk will review the epidemiology of prescription opioid abuse in Rhode Island and introduce the rationale, process, and design of a text message intervention for Medicaid patient engagement in chiropractic, massage therapy, and acupuncture services. In addition to sharing findings from the formative data collection stage and the patient centered research process to date, we will outline the design of the PCORI-funded, randomized, comparative effectiveness study.
About the Presenter: Dr. Green is an epidemiologist whose research focuses on drug abuse, addiction, and injury. Specifically, the areas in which she is most interested and to which she has contributed include the intersecting worlds of HIV infection and drug abuse, non-medical use of prescription drugs, corrections health, drug policy, and opioid overdose prevention and intervention. She earned a Master of Science in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from McGill University and a PhD in Epidemiology from Yale University where she was both a Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS pre-doctoral fellow and an individual Kirschstein-National Research Services Award pre-doctoral fellow. She helped design the ASI-MV®, a real-time illicit and prescription drug abuse surveillance system developed by Inflexxion, Inc., and has actively sought to test its applicability and validity. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Boston University where she is Deputy Director of the Boston Medical Center Injury Prevention Center. She also holds an appointment as an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine and Epidemiology at the Warren Alpert School of Medicine at Brown University. Dr. Green helped co-found Prescribetoprevent.org and chairs the Rhode Island Drug Overdose Prevention and Rescue Coalition for the Rhode Island Department of Health. Her research is supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Tufts/Lifespan/Brown Center for AIDS Research, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute.