Mandated Queries of the Florida Prescription Drug Monitoring Program: Early Experiences from a Cancer Center-based Outpatient Palliative Medicine Clinic

This article describes our e xperiences in the first month of experience with the new law, although we plan to examine queries for a total of three months before closing this QI project.For the purpose of this QI project, we have documented patients ’ demographics, including each patient’s age, gender and limited identifying information, such as patient names and identification numbers; this data will be de-identified for any statistical analysis planned in the future. We also recorded patients’ main diagnosis and pain symptoms, the numbe r of prescribers listed by the PDMP as well as the dose of the patient’s opioid analgesia, measured in average daily morphine milligram equivalents, as provided by the state database. We also noted pain ratings with and without medications, including opioids and non-opioids, as well as the differe nce between those ratings.We classified the numbers of each patient ’s prescribers binarily (one prescriber or more than one prescriber), and usage sage patterns were classified ordinally as medically legitimate, aberrant or medically illegitimate. Medically legitimate patterns reflected 1) cross-coverage of medication renewals, 2) evolving sites of care (such as a transitioning into oncologic care after treatment of cancer pain before establishing a cancer diagnosis), 3) prescribing of non-opioid controlled medications by primary care physicians (PCPS) and/or their cross-coverage and 4) prescribing within the policies and rules of the PM...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - Category: Palliative Care Tags: kollas opioids pdmp quality improvement The profession Source Type: blogs