Improve Patient Care with Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP)

Dentrix Ascend ePrescribe helps you integrate prescription drug monitoring programs into your existing prescribing processes for better patient care.

If you work in one of the 41 states that requires use of a prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP), you may need to alter your controlled substance prescription process. In these states, you must check the PDMP before writing a patient a prescription for a controlled substance to help ensure patient safety and prescription accuracy. Other states will soon require PDMP, find out if your state is one of them. Get the list here.

PDMPs not only make it easier for you to accurately and efficiently prescribe controlled substances, they can also help save patient lives by driving positive action against the opioid epidemic. According to the CDC, PDMPs are one of the most promising interventions to improve prescribing of opioids at a state level.¹

The Opioid Crisis

A state-run electronic database, a PDMP tracks controlled substance prescriptions. PDMPs provide health authorities timely and accurate information about prescribing and patient behaviors to better inform action regarding opioid use. PDMPs also help health care providers make better prescription decisions by providing easy-to-access information that can reduce the number of patients who misuse, abuse or overdose on controlled substances — helping ensure patients are safe yet still have access to effective pain management.

Improve Patient Care With PDMPs

PDMPs give you access to patient information that can help you best serve your patients while providing valuable information to other health care authorities. PDMPs help provide better patient care by:

• Improving Opioid Prescribing. PDMPs provide you and your staff with insight into your patient’s interaction with controlled substances, including past interactions and risk factors of future use, so you can provide your patients quality care with the least amount of risk.
• Informing Clinical Practice. In 2019, 10.1 million people misused prescription opioids.² Using PDMPs helps health care authorities better understand and evaluate opioid prescribing behaviors and patient behaviors to inform positive action in beating the opioid epidemic.
• Protecting Patients. The information available from PDMPs can help you communicate with your patients about their goals, needs and risks when interacting with controlled substances. It can also help you communicate with other health care providers managing the patient’s care so you can improve your opioid prescribing practices.

In addition to these benefits, evaluations of PDMPs have shown changes in prescribing behaviors, reductions in use of more than one provider by patients and a decrease in substance abuse treatment admissions.

Easily Connect to Your State’s PDMP

Dentrix Ascend ePrescribe makes it quick and easy to find valuable information about a patient from your state’s PDMP. A successful request for data from the PDMP results in your patient’s Narx score — a score that considers several variables to help gauge the patient’s potential substance risks — appearing in the patient information box on the Electronic Prescriptions page. This score helps you make informed decisions on how best to treat your patients, and ePrescribe makes the rest of the prescribing process streamlined and efficient.

See if Your State Requires PDMP Use

¹https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/pdmp/states.html

²https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/index.html