A UMass Medical School pharmacy leader will moderate a panel discussion on the health plan perspective of combating opioid misuse and abuse at the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy’s AMCP Nexus 2017 conference, being held Oct. 16-19 in Dallas, Texas.
Kimberly Lenz, PharmD, clinical pharmacy manager in UMass Medical School’s Office of Clinical Affairs and an assistant professor of Family Medicine and Community Health, will be the moderator for “Best Practices in Combating Opioid Abuse, Misuse and Diversion: The Health Plan Perspective,” from 8 to 9:30 a.m. Oct. 18. The panel will discuss different approaches managed care pharmacy can take to manage opioid use, misuse and abuse.
The session, presented jointly by AMCP and PRIME® Education, LLC, will feature Jay Bishoff, MD, Co-director for the Patient Education Branch of the Opioid Community Collaborative at the Intermountain Urological Institute in Murray, Utah; Patrick J. Burns, President/CEO of Principled Strategies, Inc. in Solana Beach, California; Saira A. Jan, MS, PharmD, Director at Horizon BCBSNJ and Professor at Rutgers in Newark, New Jersey; and Douglas Nemecek, MD, MBA, Chief Medical Officer – Behavioral Health at Cigna in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.
Full session information can be found at the AMCP Nexus 2017 website.
As part of her role at UMass Medical School, Lenz is the clinical pharmacy manager for the Massachusetts Medicaid program, MassHealth. Lenz helped design the MassHealth opioid management program, which implements several steps to better manage opioid use among MassHealth members. The program has reduced the average daily dose of opioids between nine to 15 percent.