CHARLOTTE, N.C. — New numbers are painting a grim picture of the drug crisis facing our country and our state.
A report by "Trust For America's Health" found drug-related deaths are up 22 percent in North Carolina since 2016. Deaths from opioids specifically are up by 28 percent, and synthetic opioid-related deaths are up 111 percent.
At Atrium Health, doctors are working to tackle the problem using a “first-of-its-kind” technology funded by the CDC. It’s called the PRIMUM alert system. The acronym stands for Prescription Reporting with Immediate Medication Utilization Mapping.
“It’s really about a balance between patient comfort and safety,” said Dr. Joseph Hsu, one of the minds behind PRIMUM.
It's an electronic platform that works by using something already available -- a patient's medical record. When a patient visits a doctor looking for a prescription, an alert is triggered when one of five risk factors is identified:
- Patients seeking early refills
- Multiple on-site visits for opioid treatments
- Three or more opioid prescriptions within 30 days
- Past overdoses
- Positive toxicology for other substances like alcohol or marijuana
The results have been striking. Over the past three years, it's helped prevent more than 43,000 high-risk prescriptions.
“A lot of the strategies that we hear about across the country are designed to help people who already have an opioid addiction problem, and that is really important work,” Dr. Rachel Seymour told NBC Charlotte. “However stopping the addiction before it happens should really be our goal.”
Dr. Seymour also helped develop PRIMUM. It's been so successful that it's now being made available on a larger scale to other health care systems across the country.
This is just one step in Atrium's plan to be proactive in fighting the opioid epidemic. In addition to further improvements to PRIMUM, Atrium is using $2.24 million in CDC funding for the Implementing a Multimodal Path to Recovery (IMPROVE) Pilot program which will document the benefits of PRIMUM and expand behavioral health screenings.
Atrium is also launching a separate pilot program funded through the North Carolina Hospitals Association that will incorporate peer support specialists into all emergency departments. They will be able to meet with patients who have overdosed and help them and their families on the path to recovery.