Allscripts is committed to improve its solutions to help clinicians curb opioid misuse and abuse, the EHR vendor's CEO Paul Black wrote in a company blog post May 1.
Citing reports from the CDC, Mr. Black writes more than 40 Americans die each day from prescription opioid overdoses, which contributes to the $78.5 billion a year the U.S. spends on the opioid epidemic to cover the costs of healthcare, lost productivity, addiction treatment and criminal justice involvement.
Here are five ways Allscripts plans to combat the opioid crisis in 2018.
1. Establish a baseline. By leveraging data, organizations can more accurately gleam insights into their patient populations, and Allscripts is working with clients to reveal some of those patterns.
2. Secure prescribing practices. Allscripts is making widespread adoption of electronic prescribing of controlled substances a top priority since only about 14 percent of controlled substances are prescribed electronically, despite tech being widely available.
3. Provide clinical decision support. "We are actively pursuing partnerships with health plans, pharmaceutical companies and third-party content providers to collaborate on evidence-based prescribing guidelines," Mr. Black wrote, adding some of those guidelines may be suggested quantity limits, recommendations for fast-acting versus extended-release medications, protocols for additional and alternative therapies, and expanded educational material and content.
4. Simplify access to prescription drug monitoring programs. PDMPs are not a unified source of information, Mr. Black writes. Allscripts is working to integrate the PDMP into the clinician's workflow to provide relevant, real-time alerts to potential problems at the point of care.
5. Predict risk. Allscripts is pulling data from a variety of sources to build algorithms that can identify at-risk patients and depict prescription patterns that commonly lead to abuse, overdose and death.
Click here to read the full blog post.
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