New State Law Places Limits on Opioid Prescriptions
Well, this flew pretty low under the radar.
Gov Rick Scott has signed into law a set of legislation that hopes to combat the opioid crisis in the State of Florida. There’s major changing coming that will take effect July 1st, 2018
I’m going to highlight what I think you need to know about what’s coming. But, reading through some of the new law, what really sticks out is the vast amounts of documentation required by prescribers for controlled substances. The new law requires that prescribers include in their patients’ medical record things like a treatment plan and a plan to observe and monitor potential “aberrant drug-related behavior” when prescribing for chronic pain. I’ll talk about a few other documentation requirements a bit later.
What I’m most excited about in the new legislation is the new requirement of prescribers or their office staff to use Florida’s statewide prescription drug monitoring program. For those not familiar, this is a website that is required to contain all the information from every single prescription dispensed in the State of Florida that was filled for a controlled substance. Prescribers will now be more accountable for being diligent with their own prescriptions because they’ll be able to see if their patients have been seeing other prescribers for similar, or even the same, controlled substances.
Ok, lets highlight some more takeaways from the new legislation.
Acute Prescriptions
- Acute pain prescriptions for opioid substances will now be limited to a 3 day supply. However, prescribers can extend to a 7 day supply but to do this they must document “Acute Pain Exception” on the hardcopy of that prescription and the new law also states to document
“in the patient's medical records the acute medical condition and lack of alternative treatment options that justify deviation from the 3- day supply limit”
- For treatment of pain other than acute pain, the prescription must have written on it “Non Acute Pain” for all controlled 2 substances.
- Here’s a big one:
“For the treatment of pain related to a traumatic injury with an Injury Severity Score of 9 or greater, a prescriber who prescribes a Schedule II controlled substance must concurrently prescribe an emergency opioid antagonist.”
Legislators hope that last highlight will increase both awareness and access of life saving medications like naloxone, a reversal agent that can be used during a opioid overdose.
Chronic Prescriptions
- For chronic pain prescriptions there’ll now be a restrictions on who can prescribe for them.
“controlled substances for the treatment of chronic nonmalignant pain shall be prescribed by a single treating registrant unless otherwise authorized by the treating registrant and documented in the medical record.”
It’s important to know that the new limitations would not apply to patients with pain related to “cancer, terminal illness, palliative care or serious traumatic injuries.”
There are many other changes and requirements, so I encourage you to read the full legislation below, or you can click here to open it in a new page or tab depending on your web browser’s settings lol.
So…thoughts?!
Thanks for reading.
Take care,
-Richard
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Richard Waithe, PharmD | Richard@RxRadio.fm
My new book helps new pharmacists and pharmacy students handle insurance issues, prevent misfills, deal with the workload, and build great relationships with their patients and their teams in a community pharmacy.
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