Reducing Controlled Substances by Targeting High Prescribers

In this podcast episode, moderator Dave Lehr, Chief Strategy Officer at Meritus Health, interviews Dr. Alan Weiss, Chief Medical Information Officer at Baycare Health System. Dr. Weiss describes the trailblazing analytics dashboards that he and the team at Baycare developed to help fight the opioid crisis. With an innovative data subscription method, digital health leaders can gain insights on which providers may be “outliers” in the number of opioid prescriptions they are writing for patients.

Using this data to follow up with a private and tactful consultation system to help providers realize when their prescriptions may be out of alignment with those of their peers, Dr. Weiss’s team was able to reduce opioid prescriptions by double-digit figures. This breakthrough result is lifesaving, as decreasing the number of prescriptions means also reducing the risk that patients will develop opioid dependencies. In addition, the data shows that reducing the prescription numbers did not appear to lead to any rise in negative outcomes such as increased overdoses from street drugs containing fentanyl. Dr. Weiss looks forward to further analytics developments with his team that will allow the identification of patients at high risk of accidental overdose.

Dr. Alan M. Weiss is CMIO for BayCare Health System. He holds primary responsibility over all clinical systems and their associated governance as well as providing executive leadership over data and analytics. He was previously the first Ambulatory CMIO for Memorial Herman System. Dr. Weiss spent 10 years practicing at the Cleveland Clinic, where he was head of the business informatics group in primary care and head of main campus internal medicine operations. He is passionate about patient care and advocates for the proper use of data and analytics to refine EHR development toward the inclusion of evidence-based medicine.

Dave Lehr is Meritus Health’s first chief strategy officer. In 2021, Governor Larry Hogan appointed him as a commissioner to the Community Health Resources Commission. He also serves on the board for the Washington County Chamber of Commerce. Before joining Meritus, Dave was the chief information officer for Luminis Health, based in Annapolis, where he was selected as one of the top 25 emerging leaders in health care in 2019 by Modern Healthcare.