The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has launched a new Standards & Interoperability Framework Initiative designed to use health IT to help providers limit prescription drug abuse.
The Prescription Drug Monitoring Program & Health IT Integration initiative will bring together stakeholders from PDMPs — state-run databases that track prescribing and dispensing behaviors around controlled prescription drugs — and from the health IT community. The goal is to develop a standardized approach to retrieving data stored in the PDMPs and deliver it to electronic health record systems and health information exchanges for physician access.
The initiative has already found success in pilot programs. John Finnell, MD, a physician who participated in a pilot at Wishard-Eskenazi Health in Indianapolis, said the integration of the PDMP and the EHR saved him time and energy. "It’s a 'one-stop shop' for clinicians who are looking for the medical and prescribing history of patients," he said. "Instead of having to manually log on to multiple databases, the pilot's connection provided seamless interaction with health data and quickly ‘fetched’ pertinent prescription information."
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