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Minnesota News: New Prescription Monitoring Program
Reprinted from the October 2009 Minnesota Board of Pharmacy Newsletter.
The Minnesota Legislature passed a law in 2007 requiring the Board of Pharmacy to establish a controlled substances prescription electronic reporting system for all Schedule II and III controlled substance prescriptions dispensed in Minnesota. The law was amended in May 2009 to include Schedule IV controlled substances and to allow the Board to contract with a vendor to assist in both the implementation and administration of the program. The Board recently signed a contract with Health Information Designs, of Auburn, AL.
The new program will be called the Minnesota Prescription Monitoring Program (PMP) and will require all dispensers, including nonresidential pharmacies that ship or mail prescrip¬tions into the state, to report certain information concerning Schedule II, III, and IV prescriptions to the Board. Prescribers and pharmacists will be able to enroll in the PMP as users, al¬lowing them to access controlled substance profiles for patients who are currently under their care. The purpose of the program is to help prescribers and pharmacists identify patients who may be engaged in “doctor-shopping.”
Pharmacies will soon receive a Dispenser’s Implementation Guide in the mail. It is imperative that pharmacies provide a copy of the guide to their pharmacy software vendor as soon as possible. Pharmacies may need to make changes to their systems in order to begin reporting by the January 4, 2010 implementation deadline. Pharmacies may want to contact their software vendors even before they receive the guide and let them know that American Society for Automation in Pharmacy 2007 Standards will be used for the PMP. Additional information about the PMP will be made available on the Board’s Web site and on a new Web site dedicated to the PMP.
