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August 2019
Battling the opioid epidemic: A roundup of recent news and information
 Articles on the following topics were included in the July/August issue of Hospital and Physician Update:
Statewide partners commit $5 million for programs to treat opioid addition
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the Michigan Opioid Partnership announced in June that a combination of public and private funds totaling $5 million in grants will support programs for people with opioid use disorder. Grants will fund the planning, training and coordination of treatment for opioid use disorder, including the use of medication-assisted treatment.
Two hospital systems across the state will receive grants to pilot projects designed to help change the culture in hospitals to better combat the opioid epidemic: Beaumont Hospital and Munson Medical Center. The hospitals will receive grants of more than $1.3 million for projects that utilize medication-assisted treatment in partnership with outpatient treatment providers. Additional hospital grants are expected to be announced in the coming months.
For complete details, see the MI Blues Perspectives blog.
2019 Opioid Progress Report released
The American Medical Association has released its 2019 Opioid Progress Report — the third year that the AMA has reported on actions that physicians have taken to help end the nation's opioid epidemic. The report shows significant decreases in opioid prescribing as well as increases in the use of prescription drug monitoring programs and naloxone prescriptions. Here are some key findings:
- Opioid prescriptions decreased 33% between 2013 through 2018 from 251.8 million to 168.8 million.
- Health care professionals made more than 462 million PDMP queries in 2018, up from 61.4 million in 2014.
- More than 66,000 physicians and other health care professionals have a federal waiver to prescribe buprenorphine in-office for the treatment of opioid use disorder — an increase of more than 28,000 since 2016.
In addition to the national data, the AMA also released state-level data for opioid prescribing and PDMP use.
Nonopioid directive form now available online
In response to the state law that allows patients to refuse opioid medications by placing a form in their medical file, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services recently made the Nonopioid Directive form available to the public on its website.** Blue Cross has also made it available on our website so members can easily print it, sign it and give it to their doctors for placement in their medical records. You can tell your patients to log in to the member portal at bcbsm.com, click on Forms and look under Managing My Account to find the Nonopioid Directive form.
The state law was signed last year and went into effect in late March. There are exceptions in the law, including a provision that a prescriber or a nurse under the order of a prescriber may administer an opioid if it’s deemed medically necessary for treatment.
Preliminary results pilot opioid use treatment program show relapse rate decreases
Results of the CLIMB pilot program for members with opioid use disorders show that people do better when they take full advantage of the recommended interventions, including medication-assisted treatment. In fact, the relapse rate has decreased from 36% to 14% for program participants. CLIMB, which stands for Community-based, Life-changing, Individualized Medically-assisted and evidence-Based treatment, launched in May 2018 for Blue Care Network and BCN AdvantageSM members and was rolled out to fully insured Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan PPO members earlier this year. For more details, see the article that ran in Hospital and Physician Update.
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**Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan doesn’t own or control this website.
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