As concerns increase regarding the sharp rise of misuse, addiction and death associated with prescription opioid painkillers, Care Management Technologies, LLC (CMT) announced a new Opioid
Prescription InterventionTM program that provides monitoring and intervention solutions to reduce risk and help improve healthcare quality outcomes.
Since 1999, prescription drug abuse has increased significantly. In 2002, drug overdose became the second leading cause of unintentional injury death in the United States, and in 2006 the CDC reported that prescription drugs exceeded illicit drugs, like heroin, as the leading cause of death from drug overdose.
Some well known opioids, such as morphine, are effectively used to treat acute or terminal pain, but data are lacking to support the effectiveness of opioids for many forms of non-malignant chronic pain like headaches, fibromyalgia or low back pain syndrome. CMT’s clinical findings reveal that prolonged and sometimes multiple prescriptions of opioid analgesics are common across the United States among both adults and children.
“This is a quality and patient safety issue that crosses age and demographic groups and has consequences beyond those of addiction,” said Dr. Jack Gorman, CMT’s Chief Science Officer. “Elderly patients are particularly prone to adverse side effects of opioids, including severe constipation, cognitive impairment, imbalance and falls, confusion, and delirium.”
CMT’s Opioid Prescription Intervention program runs 62 opioid-specific proprietary clinical algorithms, called Quality Indicators™, against pharmacy, diagnostic, and medical services claims data to identify gaps in care and deviations from clinical best-practices. The program helps target interventions for patients who are at risk for developing adverse side effects, who may be abusing or diverting medications, or who are at risk for developing a chemical dependency. In addition, it can also help identify patients with terminal illness diagnoses who may benefit from additional opioid drug therapy and pain management.
When deviations in care are found, the program uses a proven clinical methodology known as audit-and-feedback, which provides prescribers with feedback regarding a specific patient, alternative treatment considerations and supporting citations from the current medical evidence. Backed by an impressive body of data, this approach has been applied to other conditions and has had demonstrable success in improving prescribing patterns and patient quality outcomes.
“The program is designed to balance the need to maintain and improve access to all evidence-based analgesic therapies for medically ill patients who suffer with chronic pain. Equally important, there is an urgent need to enlist physicians and other prescribers in an effort to stem the alarming tide of misuse and adverse events resulting from inappropriate use of opioid analgesics,” Dr. Gorman said.
About Care Management Technologies (CMT)
Care Management Technologies, LLC, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Comprehensive NeuroScience with Corporate offices in White Plains, New York and Operations Headquarters in the Raleigh/Durham, NC, Research Triangle Park. CMT is a health services provider with deep clinical expertise and extensive experience in behavioral health. Through the power of their health information technology, they deliver actionable information to clinicians at the point of treatment to improve quality of care and reduce costs.
CMT is dedicated to serving patients with behavioral and other chronic diseases in both public and private settings. They provide optimal clinical and economic outcomes for their clients, resulting from improved prescribing, increased adherence, and greater
coordination of care for patients. Their sophisticated clinical knowledge and expertise combined with its state- of- the-art information technology/large data analytics and storage capacity results in a 21st century platform. These capabilities, combined with the development and evolution of clinical Quality Indicators™, can be used to identify care patterns that deviate from established best practices, and can guide care for individuals with serious behavioral and general medical disorders within a complex and often over stressed delivery system.
For more information, visit
www.cmthealthcare.com
Contact:
Sherrie Dulworth
VP of Program Development
Care Management Technologies, LLC
Ph:914-997-4054 sdulworth@cmthealthcare.com
Anna Ray-Jones
Donley Communications
Ph: 212-751-6126
Fax:212-935-6715 arjones@donleycomm.com
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