Moderator: Jan Losby, PhD, MSW, Team Lead, Prescription Drug Overdose Health Systems Team, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

CE Certified By: AMA,AAFP,ACPE,ADA,ANCC

Evidence-based clinical guidelines hold promise for improving care to ensure the safer use of long-term opioid therapy for patients. With this goal in mind, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released the Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain in March 2016. To help encourage uptake and use of the guideline, CDC developed a comprehensive implementation plan to move science into action.

This session will describe health system opportunities to support guideline-concordant care and showcases how one system integrated the guideline through clinical decision support (CDS) embedded in an electronic health record (EHR). Presenters will share a real-world example of how they developed, tested and launched CDS tools at the point of care in an outpatient primary care setting. Analysis of prescriber response to an alert designed to flag at-risk patients found that prescribers typically acknowledged the alert yet continued the prescription (85%). In 15% of cases, the prescriber cancelled the Rx. In 38% of these cancellations, the patient left the encounter without receiving an opioid. Additionally, the platform alerts prescribers to: co-prescriptions of opioids and benzodiazepines; the need to complete a pain agreement and urine drug screens for patients on opioids more than 90 days; and the use of short-acting opioids for patients not currently on opioids. This approach lays the groundwork for health systems to integrate evidence-based clinical decision-making to support more judicious opioid prescribing.

UPON COMPLETION OF THIS COURSE, PARTICIPANTS WILL BE ABLE TO:
- Identify health system opportunities to support guideline-concordant care.
- Explain how to integrate clinical decision supports into electronic health records.
- Describe how provider behavior has been affected by electronic health records alerts.