Saint Louis County Data Driven Response to Prescription Drug Misuse

The Harold Rogers Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) is being incorporated into the FY 2017 Comprehensive Opioid Abuse Site-based Program. The purpose of this program is to improve collaboration and strategic decision-making of regulatory and law enforcement agencies and public health officials to address prescription drug and opioid misuse, save lives, and reduce crime. This is made possible through the collection and analysis of controlled substance prescription data and other scheduled chemical products through a centralized database administered by an authorized state agency. The Comprehensive Opioid Abuse Site-based program was developed as part of the CARA legislation signed into law on July 22, 2016. In FY 2017, the Data-driven Responses to Opioid Abuse category of funding available through the PDMP grant program will provide funding and technical assistance to state agencies and units of local government located in states with existing and operational prescription drug monitoring programs and federally recognized Indian tribal governments. Funding must be used to form a multidisciplinary action group that may include (but is not limited to): the district attorney’s office, the state or local health department, state medical and pharmacy boards, police and sheriff departments, probation and parole, drug court representatives, child welfare representatives, local drug treatment providers, and community organizations. Grant funds may also be used to support a combination of the allowable use categories to develop multi-disciplinary projects that leverage key data sets; examine the impact of various policies and procedures on patient and community-level outcomes, and implement proven practices on a larger scale; identify geographic areas or populations at greatest risk for prescription drug and opioid misuse and overdose deaths and create data-driven responses at the local or state level; determine best practices for sharing data across diverse stakeholders; implement other innovative activities that demonstrate a multi-disciplinary, data-driven approach to addressing the opioid epidemic and assess the impact of specific policy or practice changes on PDMP utilization and/or patient or community-level outcomes.

Missouri ranked 14th in the rate of opioid pain prescriptions per capita in 2012 and 17th in total drug overdose fatalities in 2014. Missouri's two largest metropolitan areas, St. Louis and Kansas City, propose establishing a multi-sector, multi-jurisdictional Community of Practice (CoP) to leverage the expertise of action researchers and engage local public health entities across the state to help them better understand. The proposed project will achieve the following goals: (1) Collaborate to improve data identification, collection, and utilization on opioid misuse and abuse; (2) Develop community-based interventions and system-level strategies using improved opioid data and collective action; (3) Leverage action researchers, CoP, and RDCs to evaluate the collective impact of the learning community and impact of resulting interventions on reducing opioid misuse. Several public health entities involved in the CoP will also serve as regional "backbones" for their own locally-organized Regional Data Collaborative: a multi-sector coalition of providers, stakeholders, regulatory entities and data owners that have some form of capacity (e.g., time, expertise, technology, resources) to contribute to creating a holistic view of the opioid use environment, designing data-driven strategies to reduce opioid misuse / overdose and determining best practices for sharing data across diverse stakeholders. The Missouri Institute of Mental Health at the University of Missouri-St. Louis will serve as the project’s research partner.

CA/NCF