In Post XI of the blog series, “A Balanced Approach to Opioids and Chronic Pain,” our Chief Clinical Officer Dr. Huizenga brings the series to a close by offering some final thoughts on benefit and risk.
In Part X of our blog series “A Balanced Approach to Opioids and Chronic Pain,” our Chief Clinical Officer explains how Appriss Health uses machine learning to help better predict the risk of overdose by using PDMP data.
All patients are unique and there are multiple measurements that go into the calculation of a single score. In our latest blog post, Dr. Huizenga explains Appriss Health’s approach to scoring PDMP Data.
When practicing medicine, numbers are used to reassure or raise concern… However, they are not end points and you “should never treat a number,” writes our Chief Clinical Officer. Read more in Part VIII of our blog series “A Balanced Approach to Opioids and Chronic Pain.”
Details can make a big difference when interpreting PDMP visuals. In Part VII, Dr. Jim Huizenga discusses how PDMP visuals only tell part of the story and why details matter.
We closed out blog post V with an image of a typical PDMP report (it’s complex and complicated). Is there a better way to represent this PDMP data and allow a provider to see important patterns in just a few seconds? Yes! But it involves graphing out the data in an intuitive...
Metrics represent measurable items that can sometimes be expected to be applied concretely to medical decision making. One example of an opioid metric is 90 morphine milligram equivalents (MME). Another example is “multiple provider episodes” (MPE).
One of the many tools available to aid such an assessment is a prescription drug monitoring program, also known as a PDMP. Many people believe PDMPs are relatively new to the medical community but the first PDMP rolled out in 1917 in New York and was designed to track morphine, cocaine, and...
“Will I get addicted?” In the emergency department, I’ve been asked this question many times. It usually gets asked during a conversation about treating chronic (and sometimes acute) pain, and it usually goes something like this:
“Opioids are risky.” This statement will probably be taken at face value by the vast majority of people in the U.S but it is a complex statement despite the minimal word count. Let’s break it down.
Let’s start with a basic tenant: Opioids are risky. One need look no further than the escalating opioid death toll (42,249 in 2016, CDC) to understand this one basic fact. Then again, life in general is a risky endeavor and most of us are exposed to many significant (and a few insignificant)...