about
Our Mission
EPIC exists to close the training gap between what physicians are taught in medical school and what patients who use substances need. Through free continuing education, curriculum development on medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD), technical assistance, and a growing library of clinical and community resources, EPIC helps physicians and other prescribers build the practical, everyday skills to identify, treat, and refer patients affected by substance use within Washington, DC.
Why This Work Is Needed
The roots of today's opioid crisis run, in part, through the prescription pad. In the 1990s, pain began to be treated as a “fifth vital sign,” and aggressive pharmaceutical marketing combined with genuine pressure to ease undertreated pain drove a sharp rise in opioid prescribing. By 2012, U.S. physicians were writing more than 255 million opioid prescriptions a year. Economists Mary Evans and Ethan Lieber of the University of Notre Dame found that county-level increases in opioid prescribing in the early 2000s were a significant predictor of the drug-death surge that followed. Moreover, CDC data attributes roughly 318,000 of the more than 860,000 U.S. opioid overdose deaths recorded since 1999 to prescription opioids specifically.
The problem didn't stop at prescribing patterns. It extended to how little many physicians were ever taught about substance use disorder in the first place. Addiction medicine has historically been close to absent from medical school and residency curricula, and the consequences show up in outcomes that have barely moved in over a decade: an estimated 48 million Americans had a substance use disorder in 2024, more than 80 percent of whom received no treatment at all, and only about 18 percent of people with opioid use disorder receive first-line medication treatment such as buprenorphine or methadone. This is often because the physician workforce available to them was never equipped to offer it.
This is the gap EPIC seeks to close. Decades of prescribing practices created real, widespread exposure to addiction risk; a lack of formal training left many physicians unprepared to recognize or treat the disorder that followed. Closing both halves of that gap to create a safer, more informed prescribing and confident, competent treatment, is what sustained physician education can meaningfully change.
Sources: Evans & Lieber, University of Notre Dame (2026); CDC National Center for Health Statistics; American Society of Addiction Medicine; National Academy of Medicine; Delaware Journal of Public Health (2026); Psychiatric Services workforce analysis.
Who We Are
EPIC is a grant funded program of Your Neighborhood Clinic (YNC), a Washington, DC-based nonprofit community mental health clinic serving under- and uninsured residents across the District.
YNC's broader mission to heal every hood everywhere through education, treatment, and outreach shapes how EPIC approaches physician education as patient and education first.
Dr. Shareefah Al'Uqdah
GRANT DIRECTOR
CEO/Project Director of Your Neighborhood Clinic.
Dr. Royyanna Young
EDUCATION DIRECTOR
Licensed psychologist at Your Neighborhood Clinic, leading curriculum development and physician training coordination for the EPIC Program.
How EPIC Is Funded
Funding Source
The EPIC Program is supported by the DC Department of Behavioral Health (DBH) through the Opioid Abatement Strategic Impact Grant.
Grant number RM0 SIG081525
This website and the materials on it are supported by the DC Department of Behavioral Health. The views, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed here are those of the EPIC Program and Your Neighborhood Clinic, and do not necessarily represent the official views of, and should not be construed as representing, the DC Department of Behavioral Health, the Government of the District of Columbia, or the federal government.
EPIC Program — a project of Your Neighborhood Clinic, Washington, DC.