Safe Opioid Prescription: A SMART on FHIR Approach to Clinical Decision Support

Background Prescription opioid pain medication overuse, misuse and abuse have been a significant contributing factor in the opioid epidemic. The rising death rates from opioid overdose have caused healthcare practitioners and researchers to work on optimizing pain therapy and limiting the prescriptions for pain medications. The state of New York has implemented a prescription drug monitoring program(PDMP), amended public health law to limit the prescription of opioids for acute pain and utilized the resources of the state and county health departments to help in curbing this epidemic. The recent publication of guidelines for prescription opioids from CDC [1] and ASIPP (American Society of Interventional pain practitioners) have independently reviewed literature and found good evidence of limiting opioid prescription for acute and chronic non cancer pain. [2] Method Over the last decade, advanced technology has increased the complexity of electronic health records systems leading to the development of Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) to aid the work flow of healthcare providers. There are several systematic reviews on the effectiveness and utility of CDSSs. A common consensus is that commercially and locally developed CDSS are effective in improving patient measures while actual workload improvement and efficient cost-cutting measure are not significantly improved by CDSS. Patient provider involvement in developing CDSS is a determinant of its success and utilization rates. [7] Therefore, a plug and play form of CDSS which can be implemented from an external platform through secure channels would be more effective. Design The Health Level Seven's (HL7) open licensed interoperability standard Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) has a platform, Substitutable Medical Applications and Reusable Technologies (SMART) for CDSS app development by a third party. [3] We adopted these open source standard to plan to develop an app for accessible and efficient implementation of the recently published guidelines for management of pain with prescription opioid medications.