VITAS Healthcare, a hospice, and palliative care provider, is developing an opioid dosage tool within its app. The program, which is intended for healthcare providers caring for patients with critical illnesses, tries to identify an opioid dosage that successfully manages pain while taking into account a patient’s end-of-life wishes.
- Challenges: The opioid epidemic is still one of America’s top public health challenges today. In fact, according to the CDC, opioids were implicated in about 70% of drug overdoses in 2019. Prescription opioids have been blamed for many of the epidemic’s symptoms. It finds opioid choices, administration mechanisms, and dose titration based on a patient’s pain degree, medical condition, and current pain treatment regimen.
- Management: “Pain management for hospice patients can be a complex practice that differs greatly from the treatment of other populations,” said Dr. Joseph Shega, executive vice president and chief medical officer for VITAS, in a statement.”We consider a variety of non-pharmacological and pharmacological options to help alleviate pain with minimal side effects and give patients the comfort and quality of life they deserve.”
- Medications: However, the hospice space is one area where opioids are often used for helping manage pain at the end of life. VITAS is pitching this product as a way to help caregivers figure the correct amount of medications. “These are important yet hard things to talk about,” Dr. Matthew Gonzales, chief medical information officer at the Institute for Human Caring at Providence, said during a HIMSS20 Digital event.
- Assistance: Another digital technology aimed at assisting with hospice and palliative care is Providence Health System’s video-based solution, which helps facilitate talks regarding the type of care patients want at the end of life. Project Big Life, a Canadian health-calculation research group, developed an end-of-life prediction calculator to assist seriously sick people and their caregivers in determining what types of care and other services they may require.
- Unrecognised aspect: “The main problem is that pain often goes unrecognized and under-treated in people with communication difficulties such as dementia,” Philip Daffas, CEO of PainChek, told MobiHealthNews last year. “Although tools exist to assess pain, they are often subjective, manually based and subsequently underused by carers.”
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