As the opioid crisis continues to loom, Yale is taking action.
Yale New Haven Health and Yale School of Medicine, Appriss Health and the State of Connecticut have teamed up to fight opioid abuse.
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Yale’s Epic EHR system will be integrated with the Connecticut Prescription Monitoring and Reporting System (CPMRS), which gives clinicians better access to information on opioid prescriptions. With it, providers can ensure they comply with state regulations and safely treat their patients.
Additionally, Yale will utilize Appriss Health’s NarxCare solution, a tool that provides analytics and opioid treatment information.
Before, physicians had to log into a separate website to access the CPMRS and then cross-reference that information with what was in the EHR. Now, thanks to the collaboration, clinicians can stay within the EHR and access NarxCare, which provides a patient’s opioid history, with one click.
Overall, the partnership enables safer prescribing through a much less burdensome process.
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“Our physicians throughout Yale New Haven Health will now have the critical information they need to make the best prescribing and medical decisions to improve the safety of our patients,” Allen Hsiao, CMIO and associate professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at Yale School of Medicine, noted in a statement.
Rob Cohen, president of Appriss Health, also made a statement on the alliance. “We are proud to partner with Yale New Haven Health and the State of Connecticut, not only for the deployment of NarxCare, but to further evaluate the effectiveness of risk scoring and in-workflow integration through studies related to clinical outcomes,” he said.
The launch of this partnership comes at a time when the opioid crisis is top of mind in the United States.
Earlier this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced it is giving more than $28.6 million in funding to 44 states and the District of Columbia to support their response to the opioid epidemic. This builds on its July announcement that it was providing $12 million to states to prevent opioid overdoses.
And last month, President Trump made a statement on the situation, belatedly declaring the opioid crisis is a “national emergency.”
“We’re going to draw it up and we’re going to make it a national emergency,” he said before a security briefing at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. “It is a serious problem, the likes of which we have never had.”
That was nearly a month ago. But according to Politico, the White House has yet to formally declare the epidemic an emergency.
“I think we’re in that phase of looking at [it] and leaving no stone unturned on what is it that we can possibly do,” Cece McNamara Spitznas, senior science policy adviser in the Office of National Drug Control Policy, told Politico’s Women Rule podcast.
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