Home Health & Hospice Week
Hospice Needs Require Opioid Prescribing Law Change
Federal officials don’t have a monopoly on regulatory requirements that cause undue burden and make little sense. Florida hospices and physicians are working to get just such a reg modified in that state. The problem: A Florida law that took effect last July aims to limit opioid prescription abuse by implementing a three- or seven-day limit on opioid prescriptions and requiring prescribers to check a database before prescribing, reports WLRN. The law exempts hospice patients and their prescribers from the time limit on prescriptions, but still requires prescribers to check the database every time a prescription is added or modified, the NPR station notes. Requiring the database check-in is supposed to block doctor shopping for prescriptions. But “these are not patients that are at risk of going out there and doing the things that we don’t want them to do,” Dr. Stephen Leedy, a board member of the Florida Hospice and Palliative Care Association, told Miami’s WLRN. Patients in their last days and weeks of life need quick access to necessary pain-relieving drugs, instead of the delays caused by this requirement. “It’s not unusual for a patient to require six to seven dosage adjustments of their opioid pain medications within the first 72 hours of hospice care. Each of those dosage adjustments requires a query of the database to make sure that the patient has not doctor shopped in the two hours since the previous administration of the dose of opioid,” Leedy said. The resulting checks can become “ridiculous,” he said. Dr. Ana Sanchez of Community Hospice & Palliative Care praised the database in general in a WJCT story on the issue. “It’s wonderful to have that database, to go in and look at histories, prescribing histories,” Sanchez said in the Jacksonville NPR station story. “But to have a delay when I am prescribing a medication that may be needed urgently by a patient is inappropriate for an end of life patient.” Hospice advocates are urging state lawmakers to change the requirement for advance check-ins.
Home Health & Hospice Week
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Hospice Needs Require Opioid Prescribing Law Change
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