The fight against opioid use disorder (OUD) is about to get a new tool that will make it easier for physicians in hospitals to review risky controlled substances history of patients presenting in the emergency department.
MHA, through its Substance Use Disorder Prevention and Treatment Task Force, partnered with Collective Medical in 2017 to bring hospitals and other providers onto the Collective EDie platform (formerly known as PreManage ED). Through Collective EDie, when a patient arrives at a hospital ED, their past prescription history along with other data such as recent hospital utilization may trigger an alert that will show up on the emergency department’s tracking board.
This alert is triggered based on pre-set risk criteria such as frequency of prescriptions or prescribers, and would pull fill data directly from the state’s prescription monitoring system (PMP) that shows where and how often a patient has been getting prescriptions. Some patients, of course, require painkillers and other opioids; but other patients with OUD “shop” for the drugs through visits to multiple hospital EDs. In the past, a physician could check the PMP but there would not be an automatic alert from Collective EDie providing detailed data to the physician for those patients where risk could be occurring.
Nearly all hospitals in the commonwealth are in the Collective EDie network and can use it as part of the tools they employ in providing care. When a patient registers in any participating ED, Collective EDie is alerted and queries data repositories to identify in real time whether the patient meets any pre-defined criteria. If risk is identified, Collective EDie will automatically push a notification to the ED. These notifications are designed to give the ED provider a quick-to-read, easy-to-digest, integrated clinical snapshot of the presenting patient, including a summary of identified risks (e.g., security, opioid), critical clinical information (e.g., recent ED or inpatient encounters, existence of ED care recommendations from other providers), and important care coordination information (e.g., other members of the patient’s care team, existence of an existing pain contract for the patient). The new drug-tracking alert system is expected to go live by year’s end. DPH is encouraging hospitals to
complete an application to begin the integration process soon, selecting “CMT (Collective Medical Technologies)” as their Primary Software Vendor under Technical Information. Note that only hospitals that have fully integrated Collective EDie into their EMRs will be able to use this functionality.