The Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety, a multi-stakeholder collaborative convened by ECRI Institute, together with the HIMSS Electronic Health Record Association (EHRA), are releasing new guidance for safer opioid prescribing through electronic health records (EHRs).
| PLYMOUTH MEETING, Pa., March 26, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety, a multi-stakeholder collaborative convened by ECRI Institute, together with the HIMSS Electronic Health Record Association (EHRA), are releasing new 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. The accompanying 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:
“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, MD, of Harris Healthcare and chair of EHRA’s Patient Safety Work Group, who led the Partnership workgroup on this joint project. “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,” adds Medina. EHRA, as a joint collaborator on the safer opioid prescribing project, brought together experts from companies that develop, market, and support EHRs 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. “We also conducted an exhaustive search of the literature and analyzed the evidence,” says ECRI Institute’s Lorraine Possanza, DPM, JD, MBE, program director. The combined expertise of the EHRA members who participated on the workgroup and knowledge from the data analysis and evidence synthesis contributed to the overall recommendations and implementation strategies. “Many of these 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,” notes Mark Segal, PhD, workgroup member and digital health policy expert. “This is positive news for clinicians who have been asking for help in making opioid prescribing safer for their patients,” adds Segal. The EHRA-ECRI Joint Project on Safer Opioid Prescribing was a proof-of-concept project that demonstrated the value of combining Patient Safety Organization (PSO) data gathering and analytics with developer expertise in a collaborative environment. Materials are publicly available and include a white paper—Safe Practice Recommendations for Safer Opioid Prescribing: Measures and Clinical Decision Support; an implementation guide—Measures and Clinical Decision Support for Safer Opioid Prescribing: Recommendations and Implementation Strategies; and an evidence-based literature review, Measures and CDS for Safer Opioid Prescribing: A Literature Review. To learn more, contact us by telephone at (610) 825-6000; by e-mail at hit@ecri.org; or by mail at 5200 Butler Pike, Plymouth Meeting, PA 19462. Social Sharing About ECRI Institute About the Electronic Health Record Association (EHRA)
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