Don Stader, MD, FACEP, FASAM is a board certified emergency and addiction medicine physician, opioid expert, film producer & social entrepreneur. Don works at Lincoln Health and Swedish Medical Center in Englewood, CO where he practices emergency and addiction medicine. Don holds a medical degree with honors from Baylor College of Medicine and attended emergency medicine residency at Carolinas Medical Center. He is the Medical Director of the Compass Opioid Stewardship Program, a nationwide initiative to improve pain control, prescribing habits, addiction treatment and opioid stewardship for primary care clinicians. Don is also the founder and chair of the Naloxone Project an ambitious national effort to engage hospitals and clinicians in opioid overdose risk recognition, education and naloxone dispensing. As of March 2022, the project has engaged over 107 hospitals and distributed over 10,000 doses of naloxone.

Don is a recognized physician leader as is the Past President of the Colorado chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians (COACEP), past section chair at Swedish Medical Center and former President of the Emergency Medicine Residents’ Association (EMRA). He is the founder and past chair of Colorado ACEP's Opioid Task Force, the Editor-in-Chief of COACEP's 2017 Opioid Prescribing & Treatment Guidelines and the CO's CURE’s guidelines on pain control and opioid stewardship. Don served for over 2 years as the Senior Pain Management & Opioid Policy Physician Adviser for the Colorado Hospital Association and serves on multiple national and local committees addressing the opioid epidemic in Colorado and across the nation, he is the current chair of ACEP’s Pain & Addiction Management Section.

He is the founder and president of Stader Opioid Consulting LLC, a company that provides opioid and ALTO related education, policy and quality improvement services to hospitals, government organizations and physician groups. He is a well known national lecturer on the opioid epidemic, multimodal pain control, opioid stewardship, treatment of chronic and acute pain, opioid use disorders, medication for addiction treatment and harm reduction.

In addition to medicine, he works as a film producer & creative. He was the creative force behind the Emmy winning documentary 24|7|365 - The Evolution of Emergency Medicine. His 2nd film Palliative has won the audience award for short documentary at the Denver Film Festival and was recut in partnership with the NYTimes into Dying in your Mother’s arms, a film that garnered multiple awards and a national Emmy nomination. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of ACEP's 50th Anniversary Book Bring EM' ALL: Chaos. Care. Stories from Medicine's Front Lines. He is the founder and chair emeritus of the nonprofit, The Emergency Medical Minute which provides free online emergency medical education via podcasts and video. Don enjoys bringing his talents in film production, writing and podcast production into his work as an educator and consultant.

He lives with his wife Andi and their three daughters Josiphine, Audrey & Morgan in Denver, Colorado.