“Prescription drug monitoring programs could be more useful to physicians if their results were available in a more readable format, researchers said here.
The opioid epidemic continues to rage in the U.S., noted Scott Weiner, MD, MPH, attending physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “For the second year in a row, life expectancy in the U.S. has dropped … We haven’t seen that since the AIDS epidemic, and it’s mainly contributed to by overdose deaths.”
To help find patients with a potential addiction problem, prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) are now in use in 50 states, and prescriber use is mandated in many of those, Weiner said here at the annual meeting of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS).
But even though checking the PDMP is required, not all prescribers do so, said Jaya Tripathi, principal analyst for analytics at the MITRE Corporation in Bedford, Mass. A study conducted by her company in 2013 and revised in 2017 found that although 77% of responding physicians used an electronic health record, 22% said they didn’t log into a PDMP when prescribing opioids or other drugs that mandate its use.”
Read more at: https://www.medpagetoday.com/meetingcoverage/himss/77997
Source: MedPageToday.com – February 13, 2019
