The Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety, a multi-stakeholder collaborative convened by ECRI Institute and the HIMSS Electronic Health Record Association (EHRA), has released guidance for safer opioid prescribing through electronic health records (EHRs).
ECRI Institute and EHRA's jointly released white paper, Safe Practice Recommendations for Safer Opioid Prescribing: Measures and Clinical Decision Support, highlights the positive cycle of performance measurement and clinical decision support incorporated into the EHR to enable safer opioid prescribing.
An implementation guide provides strategies that healthcare providers across all care settings can use now and with future innovation. The strategies are based on three high-level recommendations:
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); and
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 United States is in the midst of a deadly opioid crisis. It's clear that EHRs and other health IT solutions have an important role to play in supporting providers in this complex crisis," says Shari Medina, M.D., of Harris Healthcare and chair of EHRA's Patient Safety Work Group, in a prepared 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."
EHRA brought together experts from EHR vendors to work on issues supporting safe technology, healthcare delivery and continued innovation. ECRI Institute's team analyzed health IT data from Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety participants, as well as event data from numerous patient safety organizations.
The partnership noted that many of the EHR-focused opioid-related safety opportunities are acknowledged in the proposed rule on enhanced interoperability recently issued by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT.
The EHRA-ECRI Joint Project on Safer Opioid Prescribing was a proof-of-concept project to demonstrate the value of combining patient safety organization data gathering and analytics with developer expertise in a collaborative environment.
