Using Public Health Dashboards to Make Prescription Monitoring Program Data Meaningful for Local Health Departments

BACKGROUND: Prescription monitoring programs (PMPs) collect data on individual controlled substance prescriptions. These data can be used to create useful population level measures, although this work can be time intensive and requires sophisticated analysis. PMPs often face a double challenge of high demand for data but limited guaranteed funding to support analytic staff. PMP measures on the prevalence of high dose opioid prescriptions and co-prescribing of opioids and benzodiazepines could be used by local health departments (LHDs) and other partners to educate providers about safe prescribing practices. These interventions may be more effective at the local level, where they can be tailored to local conditions as LHDs work with providers and practice groups. Local health departments and other local partners have requested data by smaller than county level geographies, such as census tracts or zip codes, so that they can further target their interventions. Public health data dashboards, such as the Washington Tracking Network (WTN), provide graphical, tabular and geographic information on public health topics, and offer a useful avenue to communicate PMP data with a range of stakeholders.

METHODS: The Washington State Department of Health (DOH) invited LHDs to jointly develop useful measures from PMP data to assist LHDs in crafting interventions to the opioid epidemic. The DOH Health Officer led the development of the measures during monthly meetings with a group of internal and external partners. Consensus was reached by the group on the measures. The group discussed the need and possibility of creating measures at smaller geographies than county level. DOH also began the process of adding the selected PMP measures to WTN.

RESULTS: The DOH and LHD collaboration developed measures including numbers and rates of total opioid, benzodiazepine, buprenorphine, hydrocodone and oxycodone prescriptions, individual receiving MEDs > 50, 90 and 120 mg/d, numbers of chronic and short-term opioid users and co-prescriptions with opioids and benzodiazepines. Measures will be provided twice a year. DOH staff will clean PMP data, perform quality checks and calculate relevant measures. Selected measures will be added to WTN in early 2017.

CONCLUSIONS: PMP data can be used to educate providers about opioid prescribing practices, although analytic and dissemination barriers need to be addressed. Washington State’s experience shows that a data dashboard can be a valuable resource for sharing data between state and local health departments. DOH will continue discussions with the LHDs to further refine PMP measures as necessary.