HJBR Jul/Aug 2019

46 JUL / AUG 2019 I  Healthcare Journal of Baton Rouge patients and penalties for providers who are dinged on patient satisfaction surveys for not prescribing opioids to treat pain. In addition, says Clark, there is a general lack of understanding among physicians around best practices for prescribing opi- oids. “What we know is that just about every case of opioid addiction started with a pre- scription,” he says. “Maybe it was initially a legitimate prescription, but unfortunately, we as healthcare providers are not real- ly taught the best way to distribute these medications. With antibiotics, I know how much you need, how often you need to take it, and how many days you have to take it because we have scientifically prov- en that’s how you take it. We don’t apply that same science to opioids.” “These things together created the per- fect storm. We created an environment that led to the opioid epidemic. What we have to do now is dig our way out,”he adds. Fighting Back The good news is that state health offi- cials have adopted an aggressive approach to curbing the epidemic. The LDH has column INSURANCE A State of Crisis: Partnering with Physicians to Fight the Opioid Epidemic Opioids in Louisiana Between 2016 and 2017, drug overdose deaths in Louisiana increased by 12.4 per- cent, the NIDA reports. In the same time span, Louisiana healthcare providers wrote 89.5 opioid prescriptions for every 100 people, compared to a national aver- age of 58.7 prescriptions, putting the state among the top five in the country for opi- oid prescriptions. Additionally, Louisiana’s Neonatal Ab- stinence Syndrome rate rose by 50 percent between 2012 and 2016, with the highest numbers in St. Tammany, Jefferson, and East Baton Rouge Parishes, according to Louisiana Department of Health (LDH) data. “Opioids make up the majority of over- doses in our community. From year to year, the numbers of these incidents have continued to climb,” says East Baton Rouge Parish Coroner Dr. William ‘Beau’ Clark, who also serves as the president of the Louisiana State Coroner’s Association. Dr. Clark attributes the state’s opioid epidemic to a perfect storm of various fac- tors, including subjective pain scales for In 2017, drug overdoses killedmore than 70,000 Americans, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), with 47,600 of these deaths attributed to opioids. As a result, a national public health emergency was declared, and states began launching aggressive efforts to address the crisis. In Louisiana, many of those efforts are centered on providing healthcare professionals with the tools, resources, and training necessary to identify and address addiction at the point of care. implemented limits on first-time opioid prescriptions to a seven-day supply, man- dated the use of the statewide Prescription Monitoring Program (PMP) database, and expanded PMP access to include certain non-prescribers such as counselors. “We created an environ- ment that led to the opi- oid epidemic. What we have to do now is dig our way out.” –William ‘Beau’ Clark, MD, East Baton Rouge Parish Coroner