Prescription opioid misuse and overdoses are on the rise. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that more than 40 Americans die every day from prescription opioid overdose. It also estimates that the economic impact in the United States is $78.5 billion a year, including the costs of healthcare, lost productivity, addiction treatment and criminal justice involvement.
The opioid crisis has taken a devastating toll on our communities, families and loved ones. It is a complex problem that will require a lot of hard work from stakeholders across the healthcare continuum.
We all have a part to play. At Allscripts, we feel it is our responsibility to continuously improve our solutions to help providers address public health concerns. Our mission is to design technology that enables smarter care, delivered with greater precision, for better outcomes.
Here are five ways Allscripts plans to help clinicians combat the opioid crisis in 2018:
- Establish a baseline. Does your patient population have a problem with opioids?
Before healthcare organizations can start addressing opioid abuse, they need to understand how the crisis is affecting their patient population. We are all familiar with the national statistics, but how does the crisis manifest in each community? What are the specific prescribing practices or overdose patterns that need the most attention?
Now that healthcare is on a fully digital platform, we can gain insights from the data. Organizations can more precisely manage the needs of each patient population. We are working with clients to uncover some of these patterns. For example, one client is using Sunrise™ Clinical Performance Manager (CPM) reports to more closely examine opioid prescribing patterns in emergency rooms.
- Secure the prescribing process. Is your prescribing process safe and secure?
Electronic prescribing of controlled substances (EPCS) can help reduce fraud. Unfortunately, even though the technology is widely available, it is not widely adopted. Areas where clinicians regularly use EPCS have seen significantly less prescription fraud and abuse.EPCS functionality is already in place across our EHRs. According to the Surescripts 2017 National Progress Report, more than 90% of all pharmacies are EPCS-enabled and only 14% of controlled substances are prescribed electronically. We're making EPCS adoption one of our top priorities at Allscripts, and we continue to discuss the benefits with policymakers.
- Provide clinical decision support. Are you current with evidence-based best practices?
We are actively pursuing partnerships with health plans, pharmaceutical companies and third-party content providers to collaborate on evidence-based prescribing guidelines. These guidelines may suggest quantity limits, recommendations for fast-acting versus extended-release medications, protocols for additional and alternative therapies, and expanded educational material and content.We'll use the clinical decision support technologies we already have in place to present these assessment tools and guidelines at the time needed within clinical workflows. Our goal is to provide the information to providers at the right time, so that they can engage in productive conversations with patients, make informed decisions and create optimal treatment plans.
- Simplify access to Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs). Are you avoiding prescribing because it's too hard to check PDMPs?
PDMPs are state-level databases that collect, monitor and analyze e-prescribing data from pharmacies and prescribers. The CDC Guidelines recommend clinicians should review the patient's history of controlled substance prescriptions by checking PDMPs.PDMPs, however, are not a unified source of information, which can make it challenging for providers to check them at the point of care. The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) has called for better EHR-PDMP integration, combined with data-driven reports to identify physician prescribing patterns.
In 2018, we're working on integrating the PDMP into the clinician's workflow for every patient. The EHR will take PDMP data and provide real-time alert scores that can make it easier to discern problems at the point of care.
- Predict risk. Can big data help you predict risk for addiction?
Allscripts has a team of data scientists dedicated to transforming data into information and actionable insights. These analysts combine vast amounts of information from within the EHR, our Clinical Data Warehouse – data that represents millions of patients – and public health mechanisms (such as PDMPs).We use this "data lake" to develop algorithms to identify at-risk patients and reveal prescription patterns that most often lead to abuse, overdose and death. Our research on this is nascent, and early insights are compelling.
The opioid epidemic cannot be solved overnight, nor is it something any of us can address alone. But we are enthusiastic about the teamwork and efforts of our entire industry to address this complex, multi-faceted epidemic.
Learn more about Allscripts.
This blog post originally appeared on the Allscripts® blog, May 01, 2018.
