In light of the failures of prescription monitoring programs among patients with opiate prescriptions, monitoring individual physician prescribing information may shed light on inappropriate opiate prescription, according to a report from the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The article highlights solutions bringing together physician data and pharmacy data, a task that is often too time consuming for individual physicians to consider accomplishing. This data helps physicians see how they tend to prescribe, making them aware of their tendencies, some of which may not be clinically sanctioned. Such technology solutions are currently being piloted in hospitals around the country and are showing promising results.
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Nathanial Katz, director of Tufts Health Care Institute in Boston and president of Analgesic Solutions thinks it may take more than just having physicians engage in their own prescribing habits. "Simply making the prescription drug monitoring program available is ineffective," he said in the article. Flagging patients based on their risk of abusing opiates is also an integral part of the solution, he noted.
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