SVETLA SLAVOVA: As statisticians and data analysts, our goal is to support
the efforts for those who can take the data and put it in action. What we are going to present
at the national Summit is the process that we built here at the University of Kentucky to
provide analytical support for the UK HealthCare efforts to address, first, the demand for opioids
and analgesics from UK HealthCare patients and, second, to reduce the opioid prescribing from UK
HealthCare prescribers, when possible, without compromising the treatment of patient pain.
DOUG OYLER: I focus on working with prescribers. That's physicians,
dentists, mid-level providers, around how we can optimally prescribe opioids to still address
pain while minimizing the associated risks.
So this is a study where we actually worked with our state prescribing drug monitoring program database, or KASPER.
So we worked with KASPER to link their information to
information from the UK HealthCare electronic medical records. So by linking these two
things together what we can do is we can improve the quality of both data sets.
SVETLA SLAVOVA: We were able to establish a data use agreement with
the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services that allowed us to link data for
all UK HealthCare inpatient and outpatient patients treated between 2017 until December
2020. We have built this impressive analytical data set that can then allow us to identify
the patient's pattern of opioid use and co-use with other controlled substances
prior to admission and after discharge, and especially time after discharge when
the patient care is actually moved from the UK HealthCare practitioners to the local community.
DOUG OYLER: We take this data and we can then, once we know who may be at risk,
so whether that's based on why they're interacting with us, the kind of services
that they leave from, that sort of thing, we can work with providers in those areas to say,
here's a specific group that's higher risk. So we can either look at how we're
prescribing medications to them. We can do educational interventions to try to improve
their understanding of their risk patterns and such as well.
So I used to work in the trauma ICU and the surgical ICU as a clinical pharmacist
there. Individuals that come in there that are otherwise largely fairly healthy and they have
some kind of traumatic experience and some new interaction with the health system. And all
of a sudden, now they leave the hospital on 20 new medications with maybe a plan,
not always a plan, of how are we going to come off of these medications at some point in the future.
So if we can work with well-intentioned providers,
with well-intentioned patients, with well-intentioned everybody, to try to
intervene again, upstream, we can hopefully have a profound impact years down the road.
So I think there's a perspective of Kentucky in
general of an epicenter for the opioid crisis. So I think it's
as or more important that we're seen as a critical player, as a university,
as a state, as a region, can lead ourselves back out of this crisis.
SVETLA SLAVOVA: And the University of Kentucky
researchers and health care practitioners have been among the national leaders on treatment of
substance use disorders, on developing analytical capacity and public health surveillance to support
the treatment, to support the policy and planning. And I think we have a lot to offer from the
projects that we do and from the experiences that we have to share with our colleagues who could be
just at the beginning of this battle with the opioid addiction.