06/18/2018

Hospital Association Funds Opiod-tracking Tool

The software platform will make it easier to track prescriptions

On the front lines of the opioid crisis, one of the most critical tools that hospital emergency room doctors need to save lives is basic information about a patient’s prescription history. But stopping to search a database can take precious time that a patient may not have.

This week, the New Jersey Hospital Association and its Health Research and Educational Trust announced a plan to fund a tracking tool that will eliminate the need for healthcare providers to go looking for that information. Instead, the tool pushes alerts to the emergency department when a patient is entered into the system, supplying real-time information from a variety of care settings and helping ER doctors to identify patients who have been traveling to multiple hospitals or other facilities to  get opioid prescriptions.

New Jersey saw a 35 percent increase in opioid deaths between July 2016 and June 2017, with 2,284 overdose deaths reported during the period, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.