Mississippi Prescription Drug Monitoring Program

In Fiscal Year 2006, Congress appropriated $7,500,000 to the U.S. Department of Justice to support the Harold Rogers Prescription Drug Monitoring Program. Prescription monitoring programs are systems where controlled substance dispensing data is submitted to a centralized database administered by an authorized state agency. These programs are designed to help prevent and detect the diversion and abuse of pharmaceutical controlled substances, particularly at the retail level where no other automated information collection system exists.

States that have implemented prescription drug monitoring programs have the capability of collecting and analyzing prescription data much more efficiently than states without such programs, where the collection of prescription information requires the manual review of pharmacy files which is a very time consuming and invasive process. The increased efficiency of prescription monitoring programs allows for the early detection of abuse trends and possible sources of diversion. The analysis of collected data also allows for the identification of outmoded prescribing practices, such as the undertreatment of pain, which may result in the development of educational programs for medical professionals.

The Mississippi Board of Pharmacy is continuing to address the rise in addiction and death because of the diversion of prescription drugs for illegal purposes. They have convened a Controlled Substance Abuse Prevention Task Force to establish basic operational guidelines and parameters for the Mississippi Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP). The MS Board of Pharmacy along with its task force will implement a monitoring system. Appropriate law enforcement and compliance agents will be trained on pre-criminal intervention programs. The task force will identify patients who abuse controlled substances. Once identified, the patient will be placed in an intervention program. With the creation and implementation of the task force, Mississippi will be able to provide statistical data on outcomes of cases relating to abusers detected with their system. There system will yield two tangible statistical products:

1) A report of the effectiveness of a centralized and organized pre-criminal intervention system; 2) A means to share their system with other county and city jurisdictions and other prescription monitoring states their system.

The overall goals of the project are to implement successful intervention treatment programs and eliminate the abuse of prescription drugs in the State of Mississippi as well as surrounding states.

CA/NCF