President Trump has proposed the FY19 budget for U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and it stresses that the agency should make dealing with the opioid crisis its top priority.
The new budget clashed HHS’ funding by 21 percent, but president Trump has also promised the agency $10 billion in the latest discretionary funding for dealing with both, the mental illness and the opioid epidemic. In order to accomplish all this, HHS aims at tracking high prescribers of prescription drugs within Medicaid.
HHS Secretary Alex Azar stated at the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health about how his agency would involve states to monitor high-risk medical billing activity for the purpose of identifying and remediating abnormal prescribing along with the drug utilization patterns that may lead to valid indications of drug abuse in the Medicaid system.
HHS may be able to leverage data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in order to assist in identifying a clinician who is found writing an excessive number of prescriptions. Rep. Michael Burgess told Azar that such trends would be very easy to spot within those high-end databases.
Azar testified that along with leveraging Medicaid data, his agency could also look to state PDMP data in order to identify bad actors. He said that the agency may also use its “authority to make sure that whenever we exclude a provider, it will automatically lead to transmission of that information [to the Drug Enforcement Administration].”
The DEA would also be given the authority to take away a provider’s ability to prescribe serious drugs and controlled substances.
Furthermore, the PDMPs are already in process of helping states in tracking opioid prescriptions. They are also highlighting patients with suspicious drug prescribing history. If this goes on as it is going, HHS may be able to eventually effectively deal with the opioid crisis.
