South Dakota Prescription Drug Monitoring Program

SOUTH DAKOTA PRESCRIPTION DRUG MONITORING PROGRAM

PROPOSAL ABSTRACT

    Opioid misuse, abuse, and diversion are serious and challenging public health issues in the United States and have been classified as an “epidemic” by the CDC. South Dakota, population 884,659, is one of the least affected states; however, our prescription opioid overdose deaths rose to a ten-year high of 36 in 2020. Enough doses of opiates were prescribed to South Dakotans in 2020 to medicate every SD adult around-the-clock for 11 straight days.
    The SD Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) was established by the SD Legislature in 2010 and became operational in March 2012. Program goals are to: 1) Improve patient care, ensuring citizens maintain access to appropriate pharmaceutical therapy, 2) Identify patients on the path of misuse and abuse to facilitate earlier intervention and treatment, and 3) Deter diversion of controlled prescription drugs. In October 2017, the SD Opioid Abuse Advisory Committee developed a plan titled “South Dakota’s Statewide Targeted Response to the Opioid Crisis”. This plan is a collaborative approach and focuses on four key strategies, one of which is “Prevention and Early Identification”. A strategy within “Prevention and Early Identification” is Maximize the Use and Effectiveness of the SD PDMP focusing on PDMP integrations and education. It is known that PDMPs can increase the level of patient care, aid in decreasing drug misuse, abuse, and diversion, and help identify patients with substance use disorder (SUD) and get them on the path to treatment and recovery faster. To see these results in SD, we need to continue to increase the number of users and utilization of our PDMP database and enhance its capabilities regarding SUD. This grant’s proposed projects will continue our program’s current interoperability focus by building on our current statewide integration strategy and will continue providing a strategy to address SUD, particularly opioid use disorder, in SD. Project objectives are increasing PDMP users, increasing PDMP utilization, and providing healthcare practitioners with more tools to address SUD and improve patient outcomes for the citizens of SD.

    The SD PDMP will accomplish these objectives through two proposed grant projects: 1) Continued facilitation of statewide Gateway integration to ultimately integrate the PDMP into every SD prescriber’s and pharmacist’s workflow, and 2) Continued enhancement of SD’s PMP AWARxE with the NarxCare platform, which provides SD healthcare practitioners with a more comprehensive approach to addressing SUD.