Insurance Carrier Access to Drug Database Sought

Requiring doctors to check a prescription database before prescribing opioid drugs is a weapon that more states are using in the battle against opioid abuse. And a growing number of people in the workers’ compensation industry want the databases to be used in another way — by insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers, who can spot potential problems with opioid use by individual claimants and also use the data for research. Forty-nine states have prescription-drug monitoring programs, or PDMPs. Missouri is the exception. The states maintain prescription drug databases tha...