by Kara Slusser INSPECT Director

The INSPECT Statewide Integration Initiative, announced by Gov. Eric Holcomb in August, is designed to seamlessly combine patients’ records from INSPECT, Indiana’s prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP), with those patients’ electronic health records (EHRs). Use of INSPECT by medical professionals and pharmacists is proven to reduce doctor-shopping, fraudulent prescribing and inappropriate drug use and improve the quality of medical care.

ISMA would encourage all Indiana physicians to consider integrating INSPECT records as a part of their patients’ EHRs, to provide an additional patient-care resource. Recently, we asked INSPECT Director Kara Slusser how to accomplish this.

Q: What is INSPECT integration?
A: The Statewide Integration Initiative offers a single sign-on system that creates an automated query to INSPECT when patients are admitted or checked in.

Q: Why should physicians integrate INSPECT with their patients’ EHRs?
A: The integration allows physicians to view their patient’s controlled substance prescription history within their primary care clinical workflow in seconds, delivering real-time clinical decision support, saving time and mitigating prescription drug abuse. Previously, to query a patient, practitioners would have to leave the patient’s health record, access the INSPECT system through a separate website and then log in.

Q: Have there been any successful integrations in Indiana? If so, what was the feedback from physicians?
A: The initiative has already successfully integrated INSPECT with all Kroger Pharmacies in Indiana, Deaconess Health System in Evansville, an independent pharmacy chain and a solo dental practitioner. We have more than 30 other health care facilities in the process of integrating. The feedback from physicians and pharmacists has been overwhelmingly positive. Physicians have found that making INSPECT data more readily accessible helps them make better-informed clinical decisions with their patients.

Q: What capabilities or equipment are required for integration?
A: The only requirement is that the physician’s office must have an electronic medical record system in place.

Q: How much does integration cost?
A: There are no fees. The initiative covers the cost of integration for all health care practices and facilities in Indiana.

Q: How can physicians begin the process of INSPECT integration?
A: First, you’ll submit two brief, one-page documents to help our INSPECT team identify basic information, such as the software vendor and the primary contact.

You can find both documents, the Integration Request Form and the Gateway Licensee Questionnaire, at www.in.gov/pla/inspect/ under the INSPECT Integration Initiative tab.

Then, send the completed documents to INSPECT@pla.in.gov.

Q: What happens once a request for integration has been approved?
A: You will then be asked to review, sign and return the End User License Agreement to INSPECT@pla.in.gov. Then, Appriss Health, the state’s integration partner and vendor for INSPECT software, will set up an initial technical meeting with your EHR software vendor.

Q: While waiting for integration to be completed, what does a physician need to do to prepare?
A: The INSPECT integration web page has a number of helpful resources to guide physicians and health care facilities through the process of integration. We recommend each facility contact its EHR software vendor to review the PMP Gateway Application Programming Interface (API), which can be found on the Integration tab or by going to http://appriss-operations.github.io/ pmp_gateway_docs/v5/. This resource will help give you and your EHR vendor an idea of the process and the approximate timeline for implementation.

Physicians who are not specifically involved in the technical aspects of integration can prepare by accessing training and educational resources that focus on using the INSPECT report during patient encounters, such as the webinar recently hosted by ISMA (available at www.ismanet.org/INSPECTwebinar17).

Q: Once integrated, will a physician still be able to query other states about patients’ PDMP records?
A: Yes; all practitioners will continue to have access to PDMP data from any other state that has approved interstate data-sharing with Indiana. Indiana currently shares PDMP data with 24 other states, but we are continually developing more interstate-sharing data agreements, with the goal of having an agreement with every state in the country.