Prescription Monitoring Programs

Preventing diversion and abuse of prescription controlled substances while ensuring their availability for legitimate medical use is an important public health goal.  To be balanced, efforts to prevent diversion of controlled substances should not interfere with their use in the treatment of pain.  There are a number of types of information that can be used to identify sources of diversion, including law enforcement intelligence, pharmacy theft data, retail distribution of controlled substances, Medicaid and prescription monitoring programs (PMPs).  

Twenty-seven states have adopted PMPs to monitor the prescribing of certain controlled substances and detect illicit prescribing and dispensing.  Typically, PMPs collect prescribing and dispensing data from pharmacies, conduct review and analysis of the data, and make it available under certain circumstances to regulatory and law enforcement agencies, as well as practitioners.  Further information about the status and trends of PMPs is available below.

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