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Read the press release here.

Bill Would Require Hospitals to Notify Primary Care Doctors of Patient ODs

By Nicholas Rizzi | May 31, 2016 4:55pm
 Assemblyman Michael Cusick and  State Sen. Andrew Lanza announced a new bill that would require emergency room physicians to consult a prescription drug database for overdose patients and notify their doctors about the overdose.
Assemblyman Michael Cusick and State Sen. Andrew Lanza announced a new bill that would require emergency room physicians to consult a prescription drug database for overdose patients and notify their doctors about the overdose.
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DNAinfo/Nicholas Rizzi

STATEN ISLAND — A new bill would require emergency physicians treating a patient for an overdose to consult I-STOP — an online database of prescription history for doctors and pharmacists — and alert the patient's primary doctor to prevent the patient from getting the drug again.

"The lack of communication between the treating physician in the emergency room and prescriber's office almost always leads to no change in the patient's dosage or prescribed medicine," Assemblyman Michael Cusick, who is sponsoring the bill with State Sen. Andrew Lanza, said in a statement.

"Through this legislation, we are aiming to close this potentially deadly information gap by utilizing the existing I-STOP database, and by starting a conversation between the patient and the doctor who knows the patient best."

Currently, if an emergency room physician treats a patient for an overdose they are not required to let the patient's doctor know about the treatment, Cusick said.

A recent study in the Annals of Internal Medicine highlighted by the lawmakers found that 91 percent of 2,848 patients who overdosed were later prescribed opioids by their doctors.

In 2012, the state introduced the I-STOP bill that created a database of patients' prescription history to prevent them from "doctor shopping" and filling the same prescription at multiple pharmacies.

Last month, Cusick, Lanza and District Attorney Michael McMahon announced that New York and New Jersey would share patient's prescription information after they saw I-STOP led residents to travel to Jersey to refill prescriptions.

Staten Island has been in the midst of a prescription drug and heroin epidemic, with the borough having the highest rate of accidental overdoses from the drugs in the city, according to the Department of Health.

There has been a surge of overdoses this year — with eight in eight days last month — prompting the NYPD to transfer 15 detectives from other boroughs to investigate the cases.