Dr Jeffrey Gudin: PDMPs Are Getting Better, but Still Room for Improvement

There are 2 ways prescription drug monitoring programs can improve, said Jeffrey Gudin, MD, Pain Management and Palliative Care at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center.

Transcript

How can prescription drug monitoring programs be improved?

So the prescription drug monitoring programs have been getting better every year. We started out with a relatively archaic system which only screened one state and that has morphed into a fully electronic database that you can screen multiple states. I’d say there’s 2 ways that we can make our prescription drug monitoring programs better. One, have it become national, and I know there’s some push to get that done so we can screen patients who snowbird in Arizona or North Carolina or Florida, when they’re living in New York or New Jersey. And the other way is to include all medications in the prescription drug monitoring program. Now that sounds like a big task, but there are some of the electronic record systems that already do it and are able to scan the national pharmacy databases and give you an idea of the medications that your patients take, because we have drug-drug interactions that happen not just with controlled substances but also with everyday medicines as well. I think those are ways we can improve the program.