Partnering with Vendors to Prevent Opioid Misuse

Program Goals

• Help providers prevent patients from misusing opioids

Organizational Outcomes

• 80th percentile for provider agreement that the EHR helps prevent opioid misuse

Keys to Success

• Creativity is the key to problem solving. Look outside of the existing platforms if all of your needs are not being met.
• Preventing opioid misuse can be done effectively through better partnerships. One vendor may not have the solution to get all of the information for the provider in one place, but all of the information exists—it just needs to be compiled better.

What North Mississippi Medical Clinics Did

One of the first things North Mississippi Medical Clinics (NMMC) did to help providers prevent misuse of opioids was to introduce pain agreements for patient who are on chronic narcotic therapy. Once the pain agreement is in place, a provider can create a chronic pain management plan. Providers fill out a form and enter the measures that were assessed to determine the cause or need for the controlled substance. Once the reason for the plan is in place, the provider outlines the goals of the treatment process.

Mississippi legislation requires that the treatment plans be reevaluated every three months. The purpose of this reevaluation is to determine whether the goals laid out in the chronic pain management plan are being met and whether the prescribed therapy is still the most appropriate course of action.

When first paired with the GE Healthcare Centricity EHR, the process in the Appriss Health system was time consuming and cumbersome because Appriss Health did not have a gateway built with GE Healthcare. Providers had to log in to the state PDMP, query the patient, enter their first and last name and date of birth, and then examine their prescription monitoring program. NMMC partnered with Appriss Health to manage this entire process.

The Mississippi state medical board began discussing requiring providers to check the PDMP before prescribing a controlled substance, and because Appriss Health did not have a gateway built, NMMC looked to partner with another vendor, IllumiCare, to make the process more efficient. NMMC, IllumiCare and Appriss Health began a three-way collaboration to gather patient information necessary for quality opioid prescribing in a single click.

Today, IllumiCare launches when any of the three EHRs used at NMMC are started. IllumiCare then goes to the gateway and grabs the PDMP report for the last two years. An icon appears at the bottom of the provider’s screen, and when the provider clicks that icon, the report is immediately opened with all of the previously stated information. IllumiCare then sends a message back to the Appriss Health system that the provider has checked the PDMP. This collaboration between the three parties allows providers at NMMC to introduce pain agreements, enter chronic pain management data, and verify that the plans are proceeding as desired. And all of this can be tracked in any of NMMC’s three EHRs with as little as one click.