PtProtect® – Patient Care
Here are a variety of tools to help you manage your patients’ pain. You’ll find assessments, as well as forms that you can easily customize for your practice. We’ve provided various options, so you can choose the ones that you prefer. PeaceHealth Laboratories does not endorse any specific form; we are simply providing convenient links for you.
Basically, there are five steps to pain management
Understand how to manage pain
Patients in pain can be challenging. That’s why taking time to understand how to manage pain can be helpful to you, as you seek to serve your patients and improve the quality of their lives. Here’s some helpful resources.
Assess the patient’s pain
Determine if the patient suffers from chronic pain and would benefit from an opioid pain management treatment. Here’s some helpful resources.
Talk with the patient
There are several tools to guide you in this discussion. You can also download patient education materials. Here’s some helpful resources.
Keep a current chart
Special tools to help maintain the chart of a patient undergoing pain management with medications. Here’s some helpful resources.
Monitor for compliance
Promoting pain relief and preventing abuse of pain medications is a critical balancing act for clinicians. PtProtect provides an important tool to help ensure that prescription pain medications are available to the patients who need them while preventing drugs from becoming a source of harm or abuse.
Why monitor?
- Patients who use drugs of abuse are more likely to abuse pain medications and more likely to divert medications either for financial gain or to fund an addiction to legal or illegal drugs.
- Patients who use drugs of abuse are at higher risk of combining such use with the legal drugs you prescribe putting them at risk for overdoses and accidents.
- Patients taking legally prescribed controlled medications may be combining prescriptions from multiple prescribers, putting them at risk for overdoes and accidents.
PtProtect is designed to monitor patient compliances with commonly used opiates and opioids, as well as to detect common drugs of abuse.
Why would a patient not have a drug present that was prescribed?
- Non-compliance
- Diversion
- Fast metabolizer
- Drug induced metabolism (e.g. rifampin)
- Poor drug absorption (e.g. celiac disease)
- Diluted urine
Why would a patient have a drug present that was not prescribed?
- Normal opiate/opioid metabolite from a legitimate prescription
- Opiate/opioid metabolite found when high does of codeine or morphone are used
- High dose codeine can metabolize to hydrocodone
- High dose morphine can metabolize to hydromorphone
- Prescription from another physician
- Medication obtained for spouse or friend
- Illicit use of a drug obtained without a prescription
