MAP-PC

Managing Addiction & Pain in Primary Care (MAP-PC) is a Continuing Medical Education (CME) program that follows the flow of clinical decision-making to teach pain management and addiction medicine skills to primary care physicians who treat chronic pain patients. It was funded by a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant. The program was discontinued in 2015 due to a change in the company’s strategic direction.

The challenge

Design an engaging online education program for opioid prescribers by using simulated medical cases to teach in a more immersive way. Learning modules had to integrate the FDA blueprint for Prescriber Education Extended-Release and Long-Acting Opioid Analgesics (ER/LA).

Writing for the MAP-PC lessons had started previous to my involvement. However, the project had been put on hold in 2011 when resources were needed elsewhere.

The project was restarted in 2012 with a new team. A new medical writer and I were asked to take what had already been written and integrate the new guidelines from the FDA blueprint. Given the new requirements and a tight deadline, the lessons had to be re-written but we used whatever we could from existing writing.

To focus the team’s effort and organize quickly for a tight turnaround, the writer and I held a meeting. We presented a focused writing process and high level storyboards to stakeholders and other team members to get buy-in for the process moving forward.

Working with the writer

The updated requirements had a long list of learning points that needed to be broken into seven lessons. We worked with internal stakeholders to prioritize learning points that taught all the required material to the appropriate breadth and depth for the users.

Once prioritized, I worked with the writer to organize these points into lessons using affinity diagramming.

Final product screens