A Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) is a database managed at the State level to:

• Monitor the prescribing and dispensing of drugs that contain controlled dangerous substances (CDS).
• Assist in the identification and prevention of prescription drug abuse.
• Promote a balanced use of prescription data that preserves the professional practice of healthcare providers and legitimate access to optimal pharmaceutical care.

In Maryland, the program is overseen by the Maryland Department of Health (MDH), Behavioral Health Administration (BHA).

Goals:

The purpose of this project is to evaluate the impact of a brief online educational module on provider attitudes and behaviors regarding the Maryland Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP), an online database that tracks prescriptions of controlled substances at the individual patient level. We plan to evaluate whether providers participating in the educational module will better understand the benefits of the PDMP and use it more to support clinical decision making about prescribing controlled drugs.

Specific aims:

• To evaluate the change in attitudes regarding the utility of PDMP after the educational module. More specifically, to observe whether providers with initially unfavorable attitudes change to favorable attitudes after the completion of the module.
• To evaluate the change in PDMP utilization among providers after completing the educational module, with particular focus on those providers that were low utilizers of the PDMP before the intervention.

Methods:

The University of Maryland School of Medicine, Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, in collaboration with the Maryland Department of Health, will recruit participants with the assistance of MedChi, the Maryland State Medical Society. MedChi will send a message to its members, inviting those who have prescribed any opioids in the past year to participate in this project. This project will perform separate analysis on data from participants who report sometimes providing workers' compensation care, as a special area of focus. As part of the participant consent process, we will seek permission to obtain data from the Maryland State PDMP about provider/participant utilization of this database, in order to compare pre-training with post-training utilization of this database.

Participants will complete a brief online training module, which includes baseline and post-module survey questions. The project includes the following methods:

• Collecting demographic data about practice patterns;
• Collecting baseline attitudes and self-reported behaviors related to accessing the PDMP before prescribing opioids (survey built into the module);
• Providing a 30-minute case-based online training module (including time to complete the surveys), with interactions designed to measure likely prescribing  decisions in three scenarios, each before and after providing data from the PDMP in a fictional case;
• Recording immediate post-training attitudes and intended behaviors related to accessing the PDMP before prescribing opioids;
• Examining the longevity of post-training impacts several months after the training; and,
• Comparing the pre-training and post-training actual PDMP utilization patterns of the participants. (Note that we will NOT be looking at actual prescribing decisions.)

Accreditation Statement:

The MedChi, The Maryland State Medical Society is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) to provide continuing medical education for physicians.

(Note: When registering at the training site, please use your name as you would like it to appear on your CME certificate.)

Designation Statement:

MedChi designates this enduring material for a maximum of .5 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.  

Disclosure Statement:

Marianne Cloeren, MD, MPH, FACOEM, FACP has reported that she has no relevant financial relationships to disclose. She will not be discussing any “off-label” uses of products or devices.

The Planners for this activity have reported no relevant financial relationships to disclose.

• About 30 minutes of your valuable time
• Information about your current attitudes and behavior related to opioid prescribing and PDMP use
• Responses to questions at the end of the online module
• (Maybe) responses to follow-up questions by e-mailed survey several months later (not all participants will be contacted during this phase)
• Your permission to query the PDMP about how often you accessed it before and after the training

Your responses to all the questions embedded in the module. These include:

• Some demographic information
• Your Controlled Dangerous Substances (CDS) number – to help us match your answers to the PDMP use data
• Attitudes and behavior
• Decisions you would make in fictional case scenarios
• Information about your use of the PDMP prior to, and after viewing the module

(Note that we will not be looking at actual prescribing decisions, prescription trends, or any specific patient information, just how often you go into the PDMP to look a patient up.)

• Free continuing medical education (Ok, it’s only 0.5 credits, but it’s FREE!)
• Useful information about an important State program
• Perhaps some food for thought – ways to look at the PDMP you may not have thought of
• Knowledge that you’ve supported a good cause and contributed to helping to fix an important societal problem
• A summary of the results of the project at the end

• We will keep your contact information and all the other data we collect in a secure University of Maryland information system, which requires log-in and password entry by the project team.
• We will code each participant with a number, to permit matching of the data from the educational module and survey with the data from the PDMP.
• If we identify you as one of the participants we want to contact for further information about PDMP attitudes, behaviors and barriers to use, several months after you complete the module, and you have provided us your e-mail address for that purpose, we will at that point need to identify you by name so that we can contact you.