RICHMOND, Va. – January 31, 2018 – The New Hampshire Board of Medicine has approved Venebio Opioid Advisor™ (VOA™) as one of the state’s official risk assessment tools for opioid prescribing.

New Hampshire state law requires that any opioid risk assessment tool be approved by the New Hampshire Board of Medicine. The 11-person board approved VOA at its January meeting following an evaluation of the peer-reviewed publications validating VOA’s efficacy at predicting a patient’s likelihood of experiencing a prescription opioid overdose with 90-percent accuracy.

VOA is one of five resources currently listed as an “Opioid Prescribing Clinical Tool” on the Board of Medicine’s and the New Hampshire Medical Society’s websites. Of the approved tools, VOA is the only predictive analytics tool that quantifies a patient’s risk level for experiencing a prescription opioid overdose.

“Tragically, no state is immune to the nation’s opioid epidemic and the devastation left in its wake,” said Lenn Murrelle, MSPH, Ph.D., President and CEO of Venebio. “New Hampshire, in particular, is facing some of the country’s highest rates of opioid overdose and death. It is our hope that VOA can be a life-saving tool that hospitals and care providers can implement to curb the number of overdoses and subsequent deaths throughout the state.”

VOA uses a proprietary algorithm to develop a personalized risk profile based on multiple demographic and clinical variables associated with prescription opioid overdose. It is the only validated clinical decision support tool that quantifies a patient’s likelihood of experiencing a life-threatening overdose from a prescription opioid, determines a personalized risk factor profile for each patient and provides clinicians with individualized guidance regarding interventions to reduce the patient’s risk of overdose.

Venebio Opioid Advisor has been implemented by several health care organizations, including Amida Care and Virginia Premier Health Plan, to screen for patients at risk of experiencing a prescription opioid overdose.

A recently published white paper, “Predictive Analytics Can Help Reduce Prescription Opioid Overdoses and Health Care Costs,” projected VOA to help reduce the incidence of prescription opioid overdose by 15 percent per 100,000 opioid-using patients, leading to:

Prescription opioid sales quadrupled in the United States between 1999 and 2010[2], and deaths from prescription opioid overdose have increased in near parallel proportions, from 4,030 in 1999 to more than 15,000 in 2015[3][4].

To learn more about Venebio Opioid Advisor, visit voa.venebio.com.

About Venebio Group
Venebio is a research consultancy that provides cost-effective, custom solutions for complex life sciences problems. By integrating the expertise of a global network of scientists in a broad range of biomedical fields, Venebio delivers comprehensive project management and problem solving in genetic and molecular epidemiology, pharmacoepidemiology and pharmacovigilance, personalized medicine, bioinformatics, biomarker discovery, and epidemiologic literature reviews and analysis. Learn more at www.venebio.com and voa.venebio.com.

[1] Thompson S, Sasinowski M, Zedler B, Joyce A, Tripodi M, Murrelle E. Predictive Analytics Can Help Reduce Prescription Opioid Overdoses and Health Care Costs. Richmond, VA: Venebio Group, LLC; 2017.

[2] Paulozzi L, Jones C, Mack KA, Rudd R. Vital signs: Overdoses of prescription opioid pain relievers – United States, 1999-2008. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2011;60(43):1487-92.

[3] CDC. Wide-ranging online data for epidemiologic research (WONDER). Atlanta, GA: CDC, National Center for Health Statistics; 2016. Available at: http://wonder.cdc.gov

[4] CDC. Prescription opioid overdose data. 2016. Available at: www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/overdose.html