Each year in Vermont, doctors write about 500,000 prescriptions for opioids. While it isn’t always easy for providers to find out what drugs their patients are already taking, before adding a new prescription, Vermont is just received a grant that will make information like that easier to collect and access.
Prescription painkillers are necessary for many patients, but they can lead to abuse in some cases. That’s why state law requires doctors to tap into pharmacy databases to see what controlled substances their patients are taking, and where they came from. But Barbara Cimaglio, Vermont’s Deputy Commissioner of Health, admits those electronic medical records are not very user friendly.
“We want to make it easier for them so that when they look up a particular patient they can see really easily what they’ve gotten and from whom so they can make a better decision about what they are going to do for that patient,” said Cimaglio.
A streamlined data collection system is one of several improvements to be funded by a $4 million grant to the Department of health from the Centers for Disease Control. Cimaglio says the grant will also be used to create a profile of doctors, so they and their patients can see, for example, whether they write more or less than the average number of painkiller prescriptions compared to their peers.
While each patient presents unique treatment challenges, Cimaglio says it can be useful for the medical community to measure itself against best practices being developed for opioid prescription. More and more, she says, alternative therapies for chronic pain are showing results. So some patients need not stay on painkillers as long as previously thought.
“You know because if you do have chronic pain due to an injury or some other chronic reason, you really can’t take opiates for extended periods of time, you would not be doing well to do that, so alternative methods are a big part of the tool kit,” said Cimaglio.
The state publishes an annual report about prescription practices and trends. The last one, tracking data from 2010 to 2013, shows that the number of people getting controlled substance prescriptions is falling slightly. Yet the number of prescriptions is rising. Overall, the report says, that suggests that opioids and stimulants are being prescribed at higher rates per patient than they were several years ago.
