Combating the Opioid Epidemic Requires a Plan
When President Donald Trump visited New Hampshire this week to discuss his plan to combat the opioid epidemic, people in attendance were disappointed by his glaring . The state holds the third-highest death rate from overdose and desperately needs a plan to prevent and treat opioid addiction. Instead, Trump gave vague promises of action.
国产视频 visit comes on the heels of Congress鈥 February allocation of to fight the opioid epidemic. But with that funding comes the enormous responsibility of figuring out how to spend it鈥攁nd both the administration and Congress are at a loss. Attempting to fix an epidemic that each year is, unsurprisingly, no easy task.
Senator Roy Blunt (R鈥擬O), who sits on the Senate appropriations healthcare subcommittee, has shared by many of his Republican counterparts鈥攖hat whatever we do, it should 鈥済ive an amount of flexibility that we can figure out what鈥檚 working and what鈥檚 not.鈥 That flexibility, which could fuel highly localized solutions based on the specific needs of each community, will require a change in the way we approach the fight against opioids. 国产视频 Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis has made some recommendations, but on top of being , on treatment options and other barriers have caused federal policies to fail once they hit the state level.
Without any sort of model or framework in the healthcare policy space to guide efforts, it may be time to turn elsewhere for inspiration. Here, it could be appropriate to lift a tried-and-tested process from the tech world.
When Google, Amazon, and Apple face impossible challenges like this one, they use a delivery strategy focused on 鈥渕inimum viable products,鈥 or MVPs. AirBnB was actually founded using an MVP approach: When the company began, its founders tested the bare-minimum structure by renting out their own apartment to three people for a weekend. They then built on what worked, learned from what didn鈥檛, and created a $2.8 billion business.
What the founders of AirBnB, and so many other tech companies, understand is that MVPs are crucial. They provide a trial phase of a longer-term solution. They鈥檙e created with only the most basic, in-demand features and deployed to users rapidly, setting up a feedback loop to iterate enhanced versions of the product. MVPs speed time to market and require significantly less investment than a fully fleshed-out product. Most importantly, this approach fails fast, and can quickly jettison things that aren鈥檛 working, shifting those resources to the things that are.
Applying an MVP framework to the opioid crisis could deliver patient-centered solutions quickly and efficiently at a time when implementation on a tight budget is challenging. All 50 states require a comprehensive solution, one that spans treatment, policy, education, criminal justice reform, and community partnerships, among so many other areas. Coordinating and prioritizing those solutions will be imperative to success.
Luckily, healthcare experts and researchers already know the root causes of the opioid crisis, and generally agree on what鈥檚 needed for a long-term solution. Now, national leadership must align the states so that they can work on different MVPs, learn from each other, and replicate success stories quickly across the country.
What might this local alignment look like? A comprehensive implementation plan from the federal government might first provide answers to the central questions that states have been asking for years: What should we do first? What鈥檚 worked and what hasn鈥檛? After that, the plan ought to define which MVPs to invest the $6 billion in, who鈥檚 responsible for each MVP, when results are expected, and how success will be measured and reported.
Answering these questions doesn鈥檛 have to be as complicated as it seems. Manageable 鈥渨ork streams,鈥 or groupings of tasks, can be used to organize disparate recommendations into a manageable scope of work for, say, 2018-2019, define the specific goals of the $6 billion, drive implementation, and ensure accountability. A web-based scorecard could provide transparency to citizens, letting them know which initiatives were successful and which failed and have since been abandoned.
Though MVPs and scorecards may be unfamiliar to policymakers, an MVP approach in government isn鈥檛 unprecedented. When former President Barack Obama created a new federal agency in 2010鈥攖he Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)鈥攈e called on Silicon Valley to help him design it from the ground up. and a startup mentality to build a small-scale operating version of the Bureau before it was granted a $500 million budget .
But unlike the team that built the CFPB, the implementation team tasked with creating MVPs for the opioid crisis already would have a head start. They have a chance to monitor and build on the initiatives already employed by cities, states, and federal agencies. , for instance, launched the first opioid treatment court, which expedites treatment for defendants, getting them help within hours. has applied a 鈥渉ub and spoke鈥 model to create a comprehensive treatment plan for addiction recovery. is modernizing its health policy by passing bills that allow for safer disposal of opioids, prescription limits, and public education. has set up a funding strategy that utilizes lawsuit settlements from drug companies to pay for treatment solutions, allowing them to give $20.8 million to nine drug programs. has established transparency guidelines for opioid prescriptions distributed at their hospitals, making it easier to map the epidemic across the country. The list goes on.
These are just a few of the things that we already know are working鈥攁nd there are a host of other things that we鈥檝e confirmed don鈥檛 work. We want to make sure that if one state experiences a failure, the other 49 states benefit from that information and don鈥檛 repeat it. The recommendations put forward by the various commissions fighting this epidemic are good, but they鈥檙e not a plan. And without a plan, smart and well-intentioned people will siphon away time that could be spent achieving meaningful outcomes. The time is ripe for national leadership to tap into all this potential and create an agile, lean, patient-centered MVP approach.