I like David DePaolo.  A lot.  He is a voice of reason in our industry and I've enjoyed his musings, both personal and professional, for years.

But on the issue of urine drug monitoring, I think he's off the mark.  On the one hand, I'm coming at this from an admittedly self-interested perspective (PRIUM is a wholly owned subsidiary of Ameritox), but on the other hand, the context and conclusions of David's recent post on drug monitoring beg for someone to clear up the confusion.

What did he miss?  Nowhere in his piece did he mention that:

• People are dying.  Overdose deaths from prescription opioids now outpace deaths from traffic accidents and have tripled since 1990; 
• The CDC has identified the opioid crisis as an epidemic, a term the CDC does not use lightly; 
• More than 12 million people reported using prescription painkillers nonmedically in 2010; 
• Urine drug monitoring technology is relatively new.  David's quote from the CWCI data that suggests 192X growth in spend on urine drug monitoring in CA doesn't recognize the point at which the health care community sat on the adoption curve for this technology in 2004.  Nor does it recognize that we still didn't realize the enormity of the opioid crisis in 2004.  And don't tell me we knew in 2004 how bad this was going to get.  I came into this industry in 2010 and spent my first two years here at PRIUM trying to convince payers there was an opioid problem in the first place.   
• There's a distinction between point-of-care testing in a doctor's office and reference lab testing. Failing to make this distinction leads the reader to conclude that all inappropriate behavior rests with reference labs and fails to recognize that some physician practices are by themselves driving inappropriate utilization.  Physicians who partner with experienced and capable reference labs that understand payers' perspectives and expectations can help align stakeholders (injured worker, physician, lab, and payer).   
• There are guidelines for the appropriate use of urine drug monitoring and these guidelines are based on risk stratification of the patient.  We follow these guidelines.  We help payers follow these guidelines. Testing beyond the guidelines is as inappropriate as not testing patients that should be tested.  
• Even in light of these guidelines, WCRI data tells us that less than 25% of injured workers on long term opioid therapy are being tested at all.   David states "we know [the guidelines] are specific case recommendations particular to a certain set of medical facts, not to be applied universally."  Agreed.  Perhaps David doesn't realize how many injured workers fit that "certain set of medical facts."  A lot more than he apparently realizes.  
• Not all companies offer direct financial incentives to physicians.  He lumps an entire industry together and does so just a couple of paragraphs after he details that Millennium's practices were found by a jury to be illegal and that all counterclaims against Ameritox were dismissed.  Perhaps David missed the most important take-away: there's at least one company trying to do it right. 

Bottom line: what David blithely dismisses as "nonsense" is, in fact, a critical patient safety tool, a mechanism for effective claims management, and a necessary application of clinical technology that isn't going anywhere. To suggest otherwise in light of the largest man-made epidemic in the history of the world is simply irresponsible.  

Michael
On Twitter @PRIUM1