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    Patient safety organizations release new safe opioid-prescribing guidance

    March 29, 2019

    The ECRI Institute’s Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety and the HIMSS Electronic Health Record Association (EHRA) have unannounced earlier this week new recommendations for safer opioid prescribing through electronic health records (EHRs). The guidance, based on three high-level recommendations, is designed for clinicians to use in all types of healthcare settings where opioid medication is prescribed.

    EHRA called on EHR experts from companies to collaborate on initiatives that support safe technology, healthcare delivery, and continued innovation, and the ECRI team analyzed health IT data from Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety participants, pertinent data collected from events held by various patient safety organizations, and published research.

    The new jointly released white paper, Safe Practice Recommendations for Safer Opioid Prescribing: Measures and Clinical Decision Support, is incorporated into the EHR to:

    1. Enable technologies to measure and monitor prescribing patterns to allow safer opioid prescribing

    2. Ensure that EHRs can collect and access the data needed to support measures and drive clinical decision support (CDS)

    3. Ensure that opioid-prescribing CDS interventions are delivered at the right time in the workflow for both opioid-naïve and opioid-exposed patients

    The need for this type of support is clear, said Shari Medina, MD, chair of EHRA’s Patient Safety Work Group in a press statement. “For example, one of the data points provided by ECRI showed that in two-thirds of patient safety events related to opioid prescribing, existing clinical decision support mechanisms were either ignored, bypassed or did not function as expected. Our CDS recommendations hope to address this,” she said.

    Mark Segal, PhD, workgroup member and digital health policy expert also noted in the release that several “opioid-related safety opportunities” are acknowledged in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT’s proposed rule on improved interoperability. “This is positive news for clinicians who have been asking for help in making opioid prescribing safer for their patients,” adds Segal.