This post was contributed by Dr. Kevin Samson.
OntarioMD’s EMR: Every Step Conference in Toronto on September 28, 2017 will feature 25 seminars designed to inspire and educate clinicians on how to get more benefits from their EMR.
In the coming weeks, we’ll highlight some of the sessions, which have been certified by the College of Family Physicians of Canada’s Ontario Chapter for up to 7.5 Mainpro+ credits. To register for the EMR: Every Step Conference and attend sessions, please register at https://www.ontariomd.ca/about-us/events/every-step-conference-toronto.
In Minding Your MEQs: Optimizing your EMR for Safer Opioid Management, Dr. Kevin Samson will look at how new and innovative EMR tools can help promote the safer and effective prescribing of opioids to patients with chronic non-cancer pain.
Each year more than 650,000 Ontario Drug Benefit (ODB) eligible Ontarians are prescribed opioids. Today, prescription opioids are more likely to be found on the street than heroin, and opioids have become the drug of choice for teens. Opioids are responsible for more than 3,000 ER visits and more than 600 deaths each year.
Finding the time and expertise required to meet recommended prescribing requirements and provide optimal, individualized opioid treatment for patients with chronic non-cancer pain is a real challenge for physicians. But clinicians can tap into new tools to use their EMRs to optimize their opioid prescribing, and improve clinical outcomes for these patients.
These tools are presented in a toolbar which appears in the EMR, within the charts of patients who require opioid therapy. One important feature of the toolbar is that it displays the calculated morphine equivalents (MEQs) that the patient is on, and the display turns color to attract attention when the levels are above certain ranges. The toolbar also includes buttons representing each of the recommended requirements (pain condition diagnosis, risk screening, goal setting, informed consent, appropriateness of opioid(s) selected and dose, opioid effectiveness, and drug testing). If any of the requirements are missing or out of date for a particular patient, the corresponding buttons will change colour to provide clinicians with a user-friendly ‘at a glance’ view of the patient’s opioid management status. Clicking the buttons brings up standardized, evidence based tools used to manage the patient’s care. Additional buttons in the toolbar provide links to other related tools, references, handouts and patient report cards.
In this EMR: Every Step Conference session, Dr. Samson will share data and feedback from patients and physicians in the practices that have deployed the toolbar, he will explore the toolbar’s impact on the quality and completeness of opioid-related data in the users’ EMRs, and its impact on prescribing patterns.
