The President's Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis released its interim report to President Donald Trump Monday, calling on the president to declare the opioid epidemic a national emergency.
The commission recommends the government allocate federal funding and technical support to help states enhance their prescription drug monitoring programs, including establishing data-sharing capabilities across state borders.
State-run PDMPs track prescribing and dispensing patterns of controlled prescription drugs to give providers better access to a patient's opioid prescription history. However, the commission notes they are "significantly underutilized."
"Forty-nine states now have PDMPs but not nearly a majority of those are sharing their information. This is unacceptable," the report reads.
The commission urged the president order the Department of Veteran Affairs and the HHS to lead an effort to have all state and federal PDMP systems share information by July 1, 2018.
"[T]he PDMP needs to be improved with regard to its ease of use, and inclusion of other data to assist prescribing doctors," they wrote.
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