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Time-Consuming Prescription Drug Monitoring Program Gets A Selective Upgrade

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Update: Governor Mike Pence, on September 22nd, has directed the PLA to move forward on the following initiative, which was introduced at the Governor's Task Force on Drug Enforement, Treatment and Prevention Tuesday afternoon.

For nearly two decades, Indiana medical professionals have provided information about the drugs they dispense to the state’s prescription drug monitoring database, called INSPECT. But health officials are hoping to soon make it easier for doctors to use.

When a doctor or pharmacist dispenses at least three days’ worth of a controlled substance, that information must be entered into the INSPECT database. But just because practitioners have to add to the database doesn’t mean they’re required to check it.

That’s a problem, says the state’s pharmacy board. When doctors can ID patients who may be at risk for abusing opioids, they can direct them towards treatment.

But the current database takes a lot of precious time to check—a doctor needs to go to a separate website, login and look up a patient’s information separately. That can take several minutes, and even if doctors would like to run a patient’s name, the hectic environment in certain offices makes doing so too burdensome.

Hence, the Professional Licensing Agency’s new plan. It would use money from doctors’ INSPECT registration fees to link the database directly to practitioners’ health records. Currently, the initiative only provides that service to hospital emergency departments. INSPECT Director Mike Brady says it made sense to start there.

“Think of this as the express lane, compared with the scenic route, which is our current program,” he says.

Brady says it took as long as five minutes to find a record in the old system. Now, it’s ready in seconds. Having it so easy to access, having it so readily available, why wouldn’t they check it?”

Deputy Health Commissioner Jennifer Walthall, herself a doctor, supports the plan.

“Anytime I personally have to go to a different site to find information, I’m more likely not to use it,” she says. “Having the embedded INSPECT data as one more data point within the electronic medical record will make it more accessible to physicians and more likely to [be] used.”

Brady says eventually the PLA would like to integrate patients’ INSPECT data with electronic health records for all the state’s doctors and pharmacists. 

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