By Doug Brockway
January 30, 2015
A key weakness with Prescription Monitoring Programs, PMPs,
is they do not capture and immediately make use of the act of writing a
prescription. There is no PMP record of a prescription as it is written. With PMPs data are only collected by the
pharmacist for prescriptions filled. The pharmacy often has a week, usually more
time, to enter the data.
As a result a PMP cannot detect potential diversion prior to
dispensing. One doctor hears you have
back difficulties, the next is told that your shoulder hurts. Each can write you a prescription without
knowing of the other’s action. You can see doctor after doctor for at least a
week before anyone notices.
If in your state the pharmacist has more than a week to
submit information on a prescription the window for mischief is wider.
Sometimes the doctor shopping is done by an individual trying to satisfy an
addiction or generate some cash. More
insidiously are the diversions done by coordinated groups intent on the resale of
prescription pain killers to the innocent and the unsuspecting.
As noted elsewhere, PMPs are
not notable for their user experience.
They cause significant delay in process when only used for look-up
purposes by doctors. What is needed is a
very efficient-for-the-user method to capture prescriptions, in real time, and
feed that data to a central data base, presumably a PMP, for use in closing the
in-state PMP loop.
This either means wholesale re-write/replacement of PMPs or
the use of a “surround strategy;” putting a superior data collection capability,
a “wrapper” around the existing systems[1]. If this is done then PMPs will be far more suitable to our goals of opiate abuse
prevention than they are now.
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