Geisinger’s Webinar Launches Opioid Task Force’s Educational Initiative

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4/12/2018.2018
By John Kravitz, Corporate CIO, Geisinger Health System

On April 25, CHIME will mark a first in its history – two firsts, actually. CHIME will host its first educational webinar under the auspices of the Opioid Task Force; and for the first time, this webinar will be available online to not only CHIME members but to anyone, anywhere who wants to watch and learn from the presentation.

The CHIME Opioid Task Force’s mission is to stem the tide on the opioid epidemic in the United States. The task force determined earlier this year that CHIME was well positioned to tap into the talent and knowledge of our membership to identify and share best practices to reduce the rates of opioid-related addiction and deaths. They decided that to really move the needle on this devastating problem, the task force needed to extend its knowledge sharing beyond the CHIME community.

Geisinger has also been addressing the opioid epidemic in the 45 counties in central, south-central and northeast Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey that we serve. Opioid addiction and deaths have been increasing in our state, and particularly in many of the counties in our market. Geisinger, which is known as an innovator in the use of electronic health records and care delivery models, determined that the health system had an opportunity to use its resources to reverse these trends.

Two of my colleagues at Geisinger will join me in a webinar that details our approach to tackling the opioid epidemic. CMIO Richard Taylor, M.D., Vice President, Enterprise Pharmacy and Chief Pharmacy Officer Michael Evans and I will discuss how Geisinger reduced opioid prescription rates in our region by almost 50 percent using a multifaceted strategy. We started by creating a dashboard and analytic capabilities that allowed us to identify and target those outlier providers with high prescribing rates. We then developed pain management programs that minimized or eliminated the use of opioids; doing so, our physician leadership reasoned, would minimize or prevent a patient’s exposure to the drugs and the consequent risk of addiction, overdose and opioid-related death.

Although the dashboard may be unique to Geisinger, we believe other health systems and hospitals can generate similar reports on opioid prescribing through their EMR or clinical order entry systems. We will discuss how our approach can be applied in other healthcare settings during the webinar. CHIME and the CHIME Opioid Task Force also will offer a paper that goes into more detail about our opioid prescription reduction initiative.

Please join us at noon on April 25 for the first webinar being made available through the Opioid Task Force. An abstract and learning objectives are available here. To register for the webinar, go here. The webinar will be archived on the CHIME website for those who cannot attend or who want to review it at another time.

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