The Arkansas Department of Health (ADH) will send the first round of quarterly Prescriber Comparison Reports April 20, 2018 to all those prescribers in Arkansas that have prescribed an opioid between October 2017 - March 2018. These individualized reports provide information regarding current prescription volumes, prescribing behaviors, and PDMP use, and will compare prescribers to others in their chosen specialty. These reports will be sent via email to the prescribers, and will also be available on the prescriber’s PDMP dashboard. If there are questions, please contact the AR PDMP Administrator Denise Robertson, P.D. at denise.robertson@arkansas.gov
Recently the Board has addressed numerous complaints involving a physician’s failure to timely and completely fill out and process death certificates. In order for a physician to avoid Board interaction, the Board reminds and stresses to physicians the importance of complying with Regulation 34 by fully completing death certificates in a timely manner.
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All fax machines at the Arkansas State Medical Board and the CCVS are currently experiencing transmission difficulties. These problems have been communicated to the telecommunications carrier who is working to determine the cause of the issue as it is not an internal issue within the Board. If you need to send documents to the Board please email those documents in PDF format to support@armedicalboard.org. If you need to email documents to CCVS please email those documents in PDF format to ccvsmonitor@armedicalboard.org. Thank you for your patience.
At the February 2018 meeting of the Arkansas State Medical Board, numerous public comments were taken regarding proposed changes to Regulation 2. Based on some of those comments, it was determined that some physicians may have misinterpreted the proposed definition of excessive and may be telling patients the Arkansas State Medical Board no longer allows physicians to prescribe certain controlled substances. This is not the case.
The proposed changes do not require that physicians cease prescribing controlled substances. As with any prescription, there must be a documented, detailed medical justification for the prescription in the patient record. For those cases with the documented, detailed medical justification and for which the prescription is written for chronic pain, the change in Regulation 2 would adopt the CDC guidelines limiting the prescription to less than 50 Morphine Milligram Equivalents per day unless the physician documents certain findings in the file. Those findings are delineated in the proposed Regulation.
For those persons being prescribed controlled substances for acute pain, the prescription limitation is 7 days unless there is detailed, documented medical justification in the patient record for a prescription of a longer duration.
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