Like many states across the country, Rhode Island is working to address the opioid addiction epidemic. Also like other states, Rhode Island runs a Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) as one strategy to mitigate the crisis. The PDMP tracks the prescription and dispensing of controlled substances to help providers detect fraud, diversion, and overprescribing. Using the PDMP web portal, clinicians can view a patient’s past controlled substance prescriptions including date, prescriber, dose, and payment type.
For many programs, Rhode Island’s included, getting providers to regularly use the PDMP can be challenging. Clinical staff are busy and must often check several different systems to gather patient information. Time constraints, lost passwords, connection speeds etc., all lead to a decrease in PDMP use.
To help, several states have integrated their PDMP systems with state and local health information exchanges (HIE) to allow for quicker access, more comprehensive data, and single sign-on capabilities. The Rhode Island Quality Institute (RIQI), which runs the RI statewide HIE called CurrentCare, has built a more efficient way to deliver PDMP information to clinicians at the point of care. And to help, RIQI turned to J2 Interactive, their long-time interoperability partner.
This project required that our team coordinate across a number of technology providers including PDMP supplier, interoperability vendor, and the EHR at the project pilot site. We built the interfaces needed to bring PDMP data into the interoperability platform and pass it to the pilot site’s EHR as an easy-to-read PDF file.
To speed up PDMP data retrieval, J2 also configured the system to pre-fetch PDMP information. Triggered by an ADT message when an encounter is started in the pilot site’s EHR, CurrentCare notifies the PDMP supplier to begin data aggregation and assembly. When the end-user is ready to view PDMP data, they click a button in the EHR and CurrentCare facilitates the retrieval of the finalized PDF, securely transmitting it back to the requesting user.
Lastly, to assist with RIQI’s quality and reporting needs, J2 created filters to capture some of the PDMP data in the interoperability platform when a clinical request is made. This metadata includes the name of the individual making the request, patient demographics, and key encounter information. A future phase of development will include creating alerts to notify clinicians of possible drug-seeking behavior even if the clinician does not check the PDMP document.
