Physicians and pharmacists hope to have an easier time accessing state data that stores patients’ past prescription drug use under legislation signed this week by Gov. Jerry Brown.
Such information is currently tracked and maintained by the state Department of Justice in a database, but it is only available by making what emergency doctors say is a manual, time-consuming inquiry on a secure website.
AB 40 by Assemblyman Miguel Santiago, D-Los Angeles, would allow hospitals and doctors' offices to directly link to the confidential database known as the Controlled Substance Utilization Review and Evaluation System (CURES). Specifically, it would allow an approved, outside health IT system to integrate and submit queries to the database, providing a seamless flow of information into the electronic medical records platforms used by a hospital or doctor’s office.
That will be a big time-saver for emergency room doctors and give them a patient’s full medical history in one place, said Elena Lopez-Gusman, executive director of the California American College of Emergency Physicians, whose organization sponsored the bill.
"In the emergency room, time is always of the essence," Lopez-Gusman told Techwire. "Anything we can do to make the process more efficient is good."
Santiago, who is a member of the Assembly Health Committee, pitched his bill as part of an effort to combat the rising number of opioid-related deaths nationwide.
"By all accounts, California and the nation are in the middle of a staggering opioid crisis," Santiago said in a statement after Brown signed the measure Monday.
In 2016, nearly 2,000 people in California died from opioid overdoses, and 4,095 people were hospitalized because of an overdose in 2015, according to the California Opioid Overdose Surveillance Dashboard. In 2016, doctors prescribed nearly 24 million opioid prescriptions in California.
Initially created in 2009 as a law enforcement tool to crack down on people who "doctor shop" for prescriptions, CURES stores prescriptions of Schedule II, III and IV drugs.
The new law requires the Department of Justice to make the electronic information stored in CURES available to approved health-care providers and pharmacists by October 2018. The measure was labeled an urgency bill — garnering two-thirds of support of the Legislature and therefore went into effect the day Brown signed it into law.
Under the new law, an approved health information technology system must authenticate the identity of an authorized health-care practitioner or pharmacist who initiates queries to the CURES database, as well as record the time and date of the query, and the name and date of birth of the patient queried.
The California Medical Board, the California State Board of Pharmacy, the California Medical Association and the California Dental Association also supported the bill.
