Assemblyman Cusick and Senator Lanza Announce Legislation to Require Emergency Room Physicians to Notify a Patient's Prescriber if a Patient is Being Treated for a Controlled Substance Overdose

Legislation would close information gap which currently results in 91% of patients receiving same prescription from same prescriber after an overdose.

In response to the wave of opioid abuse that has swept over Staten Island, Assemblyman Michael Cusick (D - Staten Island) and Senator Lanza (R- Staten Island), joined by Dr. Mansoor Khan, Emergency Department Chief and other members of Richmond University Medical Center, will announce that they have introduced legislation that requires the consultation of the I-STOP prescriptionmonitoring database and the reporting of overdoses from the Emergency Room physician to the patient’s prescriber (A.10229/S.07946). Currently, if a patient is being treated for an overdose at a hospital, the treating physician in the Emergency Room is not required to alert the prescriber of the medication overdose. In a recent study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, 91% of patients who suffered an opioid overdose were given the same prescription by the same prescriber following their hospital treatment.