Making treatment programs more available and expanding the use of a drug prescription database are among the ways Arkansas can reduce painkiller abuse and overdose deaths, a professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences told lawmakers Monday.
"We can address this, and we need to address it now," G. Richard Smith, chairman of the advisory committee for the state's Prescription Drug Monitoring Program, told the Legislature's public health committees. "We don't need to be waiting another five years."
According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 157 Arkansans died in 2014 of prescription overdoses of opioid pain medications, up from 15 such deaths in 2000.
Smith said he hopes to see the Legislature pass a law during next year's session that would allow the Prescription Drug Monitoring program to give doctors more information about how their prescribing practices compare to their peers.
Established in 2013, the program maintains a database of prescriptions for pain medications and other frequently abused drugs.
Act 1208 of 2015 allows the state Department of Health to notify the Arkansas State Medical Board if a doctor's prescribing patterns meet the board's criteria for suspicious activity.
But Smith said he wants to educate doctors who may prescribe opioids too frequently even though the prescribing wouldn't trigger an alert.
"The whole idea is you try to get everybody to prescribe less," he said.
Smith also said the state's treatment programs are "hard to get in and costly" for patients.
Michael Mancino, director of UAMS' Center for Addiction Services and Treatment, said after the hearing that many of his patients end up dropping out because of the cost.
Medicaid will cover the drugs used to treat opioid addiction, but not the counseling services provided by the center, he said.
The UAMS center also doesn't accept private insurance reimbursement for counseling services because the private plans usually don't cover enough of the services to make the billing worthwhile, he said.
"That's probably one of the biggest sources of discontinued treatment," Mancino said. "They can't afford it."
NW News on 06/15/2016