BJA FY 21 Harold Rogers Prescription Drug Monitoring Program(PDMP)

Prescription drug abuse continues to be a major national public health concern.  The New Jersey Prescription Monitoring Program ("NJPMP") is an important weapon in New Jersey's arsenal to combat the abuse, misuse and diversion of prescription drugs. Since becoming operational in 2011, a total of 51,104 prescribers and 7,781 pharmacists have registered for access to the NJPMP, representing approximately 98 percent of eligible prescribers.  To date, over 117 million controlled dangerous substance, human growth hormone and gabapentin prescriptions have been entered into the NJPMP from more than 3,300 New Jersey licensed pharmacies. User queries via the online NJPMP portal continue to grow exponentially, increasing from 626,151 in 2012 to over 3.8 million in 2019.  In 2020, yearly online NJPMP portal patient queries dropped for the first time in NJPMP history to just over 2.7 million, highlighting our NJPMP users’ increased adoption and usage of integration with electronic health record (“EHR") systems. Integration with EHRs accounted for over 21.5 million in-state patient record interactions with over 2.2 million in-state patient queries and over 27.1 million out-of-state patient record interactions with over 5.4 million out-of-state patient queries. As New Jersey continues to connect to neighboring and regional states, interstate queries grew to over 8.5 million in 2020, up from 591,092 in 2016. 

The Department of Law and Public Safety and the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs are seeking funding in the amount of $1,500,000 to make the following five (5) enhancements designed to improve NJPMP information, reporting, quality, and integrity which will allow for better clinical decision making by prescribers as well as further New Jersey’s efforts to prevent the abuse, misuse and diversion of controlled substances.

Maintain the enhanced NJPMP operating platform, NarxCare;
Implement a NJPMP user profile audit/verification tool;
Purchase a module that will allow for automated surveillance capable of monitoring prescribers’ compliance with mandatory NJPMP patient queries;
Develop an expanded prescriber/pharmacy outlier module; and
Develop numerous hardware and software upgrades for the NJPMP.