Harold Rogers PDMP National Meeting

The 8th Harold Rogers Prescription Drug Monitoring Program National Meeting will be held in Washington, D.C. from June 4th through June 6th at the Washington Plaza Hotel, 10 Thomas Circle NW, Washington, DC 20005.

Register online. View the agenda.

NASCSA 28th Annual Conference

NASCSA will hold its annual meeting in Scottsdale, AZ from October 23rd through 26th at the Hotel Valley Ho. Details about the conference are forthcoming on the NASCSA website.

RxNorm

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have created the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) to facilitate interoperability between health related computer systems. One UMLS tool is RxNorm. RxNorm provides ‘normalized’ names for clinical drugs and links these names to related vocabularies in pharmacy management and drug interaction software. The goal for RxNorm is to permit varying computer systems to communicate medication information through the same vocabulary.

View the website.

NIDA’s PEERx

The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) announced the establishment of a website designed to educate children 11 to 15 years of age on the ‘science behind drug abuse’. The site focuses on how drug abuse affects the body; providing users with accurate information to make better choices concerning their health. The site, designed with input from teenagers, includes facts, illustrations, quizzes, and games to make learning about the risks of drug abuse more impactful, interactive and fun. The site also includes a section to educate parents and teachers.

Visit the website.

Drug-free housing and day treatment helps addicts

A study, conducted by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine researchers, indicates that opioid addicts have a greater chance of remaining drug free when provided with drug-free housing and day treatment following detoxification. The study found that participants who received housing and day treatment were twice as likely to remain drug-free as those who only received housing, and ten times as likely as those who did not receive housing nor day treatment. Lead researcher, Michelle Tuten, stated that, “If we want to help people stay off heroin and stop abusing prescription painkillers, we need to do more than help them initiate abstinence; we need to help them maintain abstinence and build a drug-free lifestyle as well.”

View the article.