Massachusetts resident physicians find new way to combat opioid abuse: 5 insights

Practice Management

To address the opioid epidemic, two Massachusetts resident organizations teamed up to obtain access to the state's prescription drug monitoring program.

Here are five insights:

 

1. Prior to the organizations' call for regulatory action, resident physicians in the state didn't have access to the PDMP database to examine their patient's prescription history before prescribing opioids.

 

2. Resident physicians had to try and find an attending physician to check the PDMP if the resident physicians had a patient in need of a prescription for a controlled substance.

 

3. The organizations created and circulated a petition seeking access for residents to the PDMP and gathered nearly 300 medical students, residents and attending physicians' signatures throughout Massachusetts.

 

4. At the Massachusetts Medical Society, Grayson Armstrong, MD, an ophthalmology resident at Boston-based Harvard Medical school and a leader within the Cambridge Health Alliance union, presented attendees with the petition, in which many physicians signed.

 

5. Dr. Armstrong spoke with Gov. Charlie Baker about the opioid crisis in the state and told the governor residents did not have access to the PDMP. Dr. Armstrong said, "As soon as he was aware, everyone else got on board with it…It was a relatively quick change."

 

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