The New Emergency Department Drug Surveillance Program: Understanding and Monitoring Local Opioid and Other Drug Trends

The Emergency Department Drug Surveillance (EDDS) program was designed by staff at the Center for Substance Abuse Research (CESAR) at the University of Maryland, College Park, to offer the country a new way to obtain objective, nearly real-time information about the trends in the drugs recently used by persons seeking treatment at emergency departments (EDs) and to discover emerging drugs that are not included the hospitals’ limited routine urinalysis screens. This information is vital to ensuring that patients get appropriate and equitable treatment and to inform them of the drugs they have been exposed to. EDDS achieves these goals by obtaining de-identified quarterly exports of urinalysis results from each hospital’s electronic health records (EHRs) and by offering each hospital the opportunity to submit annually a sample of 150 de-identified urine specimens for expanded testing for approximately 500 drugs. The EDDS EHR analyses were successfully pilot tested in seven Maryland hospitals from 2018-2020. The results are disseminated on CESAR’s website (https://cesar.umd.edu/landing/EDDS) and led two Baltimore hospitals to uncover a gap in their testing for fentanyl and to add the drug to their routine urinalysis panels (Dezman et al., 2020). In 2020, the Office of National Drug Control Policy funded the expansion of EDDS to five hospitals outside of Maryland. The current project is conducting EDDS in five states (California, Colorado, New Jersey, Oregon, and Utah). This session will demonstrate the value of the EDDS approach for uncovering local changes in drug trends, as well as to show the impact of EDDS results on hospital treatment and testing protocols.