Optimizing Opioid Management Through Health IT

[Amy Saenger]

Written by: Eric Widen, CEO of HBI Solutions

From cancer care and chronic pain management to emergency care, dental care and episodic pain management – the use of opioids have reached a national platform because of its potentially devastating effects.
The CDC reports the significance of its rise in the U.S.:

• From 1999 to 2017, almost 400,000 people died from an overdose involving an opioid, including prescription and illicit opioids.
  
  
• Around 68% of the more than 70,200 drug overdose deaths in 2017 involved an opioid.
  
  
• In 2017, the number of overdose deaths involving opioids (including prescription opioids and illegal opioids like heroin and illicitly manufactured fentanyl) was 6 times higher than in 1999.
  
  
• On average, 130 Americans die every day from an opioid overdose.
  
  
• It is the #1 cause of death for those less than 50 years of age
  
  

Yet, providers and consumers worry that patients will not get the medication they need to manage pain effectively. Can health information technology and analytics help reconcile these two seemingly diverse objectives?
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