“UNC-Chapel Hill’s Injury Prevention Research Center has always been at the forefront of the injury and violence prevention efforts in North Carolina,” said Rep. Price. “This grant will support and enhance our state’s critical efforts in preventing harmful effects of opioids and will ensure that patients requiring pain management treatment will receive the necessary care.”
Shabbar I. Ranapurwala, PhD, a core faculty member at the IPRC and assistant professor of epidemiology at the UNC-Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health, will lead the study.
“This grant,” Ranapurwala said, “will allow us to examine the impact of this mandate on physicians’ prescribing behaviors and patient health outcomes, including opioid use disorders and opioid overdoses, both fatal and nonfatal. We also will examine the resources, systems, strategies and partnerships that assist implementation of state laws that are informed by CDC’s opioid prescribing guidelines for acute and post-surgical pain.”
The UNC School of Medicine, Duke University, Vanderbilt University, the North Carolina Division of Public Health and the Tennessee Department of Health will collaborate with the IPRC on this study.
Other IPRC investigators include Steve Marshall, PhD, IPRC director; Meghan Shanahan, PhD, core IPRC faculty member; and Rebecca Naumann, PhD, core IPRC faculty member; and Nabarun Dasgupta, PhD, core IPRC faculty member.
Other collaborators from UNC-Chapel Hill are Tim Carey, MD, MPH, distinguished professor of family medicine and co-principal investigator at N.C. TraCS Institute; Paul Chelminski, MD, MPH, professor of family medicine and director of the UNC Physician Assistant Program.
Also collaborating are Li-Tzy Wu, DSc, professor of psychiatry and medicine at Duke University and director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse Clinical Trials Network (mid-Southern node); David Edwards, MD, PhD, assistant professor of anesthesiology, pain medicine and neurological surgery and chief of Vanderbilt Pain Medicine at Vanderbilt University; Scott Proescholdbell, MPH, senior epidemiologist in the Injury and Violence Prevention Branch at the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services; and Melissa McPheeters, PhD, Gillings School alumna (MPH in maternal and child health 1996; PhD in epidemiology, 2003) and director of the Tennessee Department of Health’s Office of Informatics and Analytics.