Fighting the Opioid Epidemic with the Right People and the Right Tools

[joe_warbington]

Cara Martino MSN, RN - Enterprise Business Intelligence Manager at Jefferson Health

"Part of the reason why I joined Jefferson Health—and why I eventually transitioned over to the Business Intelligence Team—was the ability to effect change through data. As an ICU nurse, I was able to help a few patients each day, but with this job we have the ability to impact all the lives seen at Jefferson. For the opioid crisis, it was important for data and analytics to have a seat at the table to try and combat something this difficult."

"Qlik Sense has made a monumental difference in the way we track prescriptions by patient. Using the data aggregated in the platform, we have a way to see overall ordering trends. This includes a sheet to display patients with two or more prescriptions in a thirty-day period. Once we select an individual patient, we identify who gets prescriptions from multiple providers versus who has one provider ordering all of them. We even know exactly what they're on, like Methadone or Oxycontin. If one patient is identified to have multiple prescriptions, we can quickly follow up with providers to understand why."

"It’s not just that we have insights—we’re actually acting on them. Thanks to the platform we’ve built, we can work directly with our EHR vendor to calculate things like morphine equivalent daily dose (MEDD). I can see what the MEDD is for any particular patient at the touch of a button. Not every clinician truly understands MEDD or what the recommended dose is, so we are working to put instructions within the system about the calculation along with recommendations.

Fighting the opioid crisis isn't only the responsibility of the ordering clinician, but they do play an important role. Today, because we can show patients who are on opioids within the system and what their MEDD is, anyone who opens that chart can intervene with that patient's prescription if necessary. "

Learn how Jefferson Health is using Qlik Sense and Epic to fight the opioid epidemic with data insights:

Fighting the Opioid Epidemic with the Right People and the Right Tools