Prescribing Essentials: Principles in Safe and Responsible Medication Use - 3 AOA Category 1-A Credits

At the conclusion of this course, participants will be able to:

1. Analyze federal and state-controlled-substance prescribing requirements to support Systems-Based Practice workflow compliance for PDMP use and related safety processes.

2. Apply evidence-based principles of pain management and appropriate prescribing to clinical practice to minimize patient risk.

3. Contrast clinical strategies for managing acute pain with multimodal interventions versus palliative medicine approaches for serious illness.

4. Implement validated screening and response protocols for patients exhibiting signs of substance abuse or addiction.

5. Evaluate ethical, legal, and whole-person clinical frameworks for providing comprehensive end-of-life care, including patient values, function, psychosocial context, and interdisciplinary care considerations relevant to osteopathic medical practice.

This course reviews core U.S. prescriber education topics relevant to safe and compliant controlled-substance prescribing, evidence-based acute pain management, palliative care principles, and identification and response to substance use disorder. Learners will connect federal requirements and common state-level prescribing expectations (e.g., PDMP checks where required, documentation, and prescribing-limit policies that vary by jurisdiction) to practical clinical decision-making, including multimodal analgesia strategies and risk-screening workflows. The goal is to support safer prescribing practices that reduce preventable harm while maintaining appropriate symptom control across acute, chronic, and end-of-life contexts. Osteopathic physicians face ongoing risk from rapidly changing legal requirements, variable workflow implementation, and inconsistent uptake of evidence-based pain and addiction practices. This activity addresses those gaps by translating key mandates and clinical principles into usable processes for daily practice.

This activity is designed for Osteopathic physicians and addresses federal requirements and widely adopted best practices. For osteopathic physicians, the course also emphasizes whole-person, patientcentered clinical reasoning by integrating biologic, behavioral, functional, social, and endof-life considerations into safer prescribing, pain management, and substance-usedisorder response workflows.

Terminology Note: Prescription drug monitoring programs are commonly referred to as PDMPs (terminology varies by state; some jurisdictions use “PMP”). In this course, PDMP refers to the state-level controlled-substance prescription monitoring registry used to support safer prescribing and compliance workflows. For osteopathic physicians, these topics should be applied within a whole-person framework that considers symptom burden, functional status, behavioral health, social context, goals of care, and the patient’s values alongside regulatory and pharmacologic decision-making. This approach is particularly relevant in pain management, palliative care, and opioid-risk assessment, 2 Prescribing Essentials: Principles in Safe and Responsible Medication Use where clinical decisions are strengthened when prescribers integrate the patient’s full biopsychosocial context into diagnosis, treatment planning, monitoring, and care transitions.