DES MOINES, Iowa, March 25, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- As the nation copes with the impact of the ongoing opioid crisis, businesses also deal with the overall impact of opioid dependency from increased cost of health care delivery, increased litigation exposure, and $10 billion per year from absenteeism and presenteeism alone.
Factors such as lost productivity, increased workplace accidents, turnover and insurance claims, as well as the impact on employees and loved ones struggling with opioid dependency in their family have led to another level of damage done by this national health problem.
Opioid Clinical Management Inc. (OPCM) is working with companies to attack the opioid problem from a new angle: approach opioid abuse and overprescribing from the relationship between employers, health plans and the physicians prescribing opioids.
With a career in both medical data software development and substance abuse intervention, OPCM founder and CEO Mike Vasquez sees an uncharted area in using predictive analytics to review company employee case data to identify the costs where opioids are being overprescribed and intervene from a corporate perspective on the company’s behalf.
“We don’t identify employees. We protect their privacy—and their employers liability,” said Vasquez. “We identify patterns of dependency within their healthcare network. And we identify all the physicians who are, in most cases, unknowingly overprescribing those opioids. That’s the key to real change.”
Through the development of proprietary predictive analytics and integrated case management, OPCM’s new service, OpioidRX, allows large self-insured employer groups to identify employee dependency trends within a company or health plan group.
Based on that reporting, OPCM then confidentially approaches physicians who have been identified as overprescribing on the company’s behalf. OPCM will work to provide education and encourage adoption of CDC best practices for prescribing opioids.
“We work to make physicians aware of the real costs of opioid addiction and how our client companies or self-insured groups are adopting new guidelines to provide the safest, best options for their employees,” said Vasquez. “Our goal is a simple: Save money. Save lives.”
About OPCM:
Opioid Clinical Management Inc. (OPCM) is an organization dedicated to dealing with the national opioid crisis by addressing and correcting overprescribing. Using patent-pending predictive analytics, along with company healthcare data, OPCM’s OpioidRx service identifies patterns of opioid dependency within an organization’s health care network. Rather than identify individual employees, OPCM identifies physicians who are overprescribing opioids and confidentially intervenes on a company’s behalf, working with physicians and healthcare providers to adopt CDC best practices for prescribing opioids. For more information, visit www.opioidcm.com.
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