denverhealthfoundation.orgWords Matter (Denver Health)
“Words Matter”
Denver Health (the city's public safety-net health system, Denver Health and Hospital Authority) staff campaign planned from fall 2022 and launched system-wide in spring 2024 by its Center for Addiction Medicine to replace stigmatizing substance use terms ("addict", "abuser", "medication-assisted") with person-first, clinically accurate language: a 20-minute staff presentation, a language guide, a data dashboard, a pledge and revised EHR note templates.
- Years
- 2024–now
- Country
- United States
- Topic
- DrugsOpioids
- Asks people to
- Reduce stigma
- Strategy
- Policy pairedSimple instructionStigma reduction
- Channel
- Clinical setting
- Audience
- CliniciansDenver Health employees who write in or speak with patients (1,521 staff across 26 departments reached), plus providers trained through CAM Academy.
Evidence
Quasi-experimentalMixed
Interrupted time series over ~15 million clinical notes (Jan 2022-Mar 2025): 34.6% reduction in notes with stigmatizing substance-use language 12 months after launch (about 1,381 fewer notes), not statistically significant; 21% of stigmatizing terms came from EHR templates, and template fixes produced the largest drop; staff knowledge up 1.0 point on a 5-point scale (n=345); 763 pledges (Braun et al. 2026).
Sponsor (who paid)
- Denver Health and Hospital Authority, Center for Addiction Medicine State local government, funder and creator
Credits (who made it)
Not recorded yet.
Related campaigns
- #StateWithoutStigMA 2015–now
- Lift The Label 2018–now
Sources
- Braun HM et al. Words matter: A campaign to reduce stigmatizing substance use language at an urban health system. J Subst Use Addict Treat evaluation · 2026 · DOI 10.1016/j.josat.2026.210000 · PMID 42035880
- Denver Health Foundation: Center for Addiction Medicine Pioneering a Better Future for Denver sponsor · 2023
- CU Anschutz (FOX31): Denver Health launches campaign around language used when treating addiction news · 2024
- Words Matter (Denver Health Center for Addiction Medicine; Wayback copy) sponsor
- Denver Health officials: Words matter when discussing substance abuse (Denver Gazette, 31 Aug 2023) news · 2023
Research notes
US-CO (Denver). Discovered 2026-10-22 for #17. Internal, clinician-facing campaign, not a public ad campaign; included because it is in docs/opioid-campaigns-literature.md and is run by the city's public health system. No agency credits found (in-house). Abstract read via PubMed E-utilities. denverhealth.org Words Matter page returned 503 on 2026-10-22. Separate 2025 Denver Health patient-story effort ("Stories in Black and White" exhibit, Denver7) logged in state-campaigns.tsv only. Merged 2026-10-22 with a duplicate record (denver-health-words-matter) created by the clinician-campaigns pass.
Record cases/denver-words-matter.json, updated 2026-10-22· Link to this campaign