That's certainly possible, but it's not likely (in my experience working with CDS features). These sorts of alerts are pulling data from all sorts of different places, and there's generally at least some engineering effort involved in setting up new "categories" of alerts like this.

it doesn’t sound like it was a new category...just some new piece of logic that would trigger “prescribe opioids!” when the doctor typed something in

why would you think these sham alerts rely on actual data that was “new”? these were probably as simple as some if statement that said “if patient over X age and in pain and lives in Y state then show alert”

The sad thibg about this whole opioid epidemic is that people such as myself, who actually suffer from chronic pain can't get relief. Not that opioids would help me, wrong kind of pain. I suffer from nerve pain which requires a whole other class of drugs, but the docs dont want to prescribe anything anymore, even non opioids. It fucking sucks, degrades my quality of life and ability to carry out day to day tasks.

My guess is it's the "in pain" part that would require some engineering effort to expose as an option inside the CDS dashboard (assuming such a dashboard existed).

Obviously none of us know how this was implemented, and it's possible PF had a slick CDS design tool that was super powerful and made these sorts of things easy. That's never been my experience though...