WCMS is proud to announce another high quality addition to the series of
"The Physicians' Voice," a series of media presentations for the general public that showcase physicians' world-class medical expertise and focus on patient/community health.

E. Blake Fagan is a family physician and the chief education officer at the Mountain Area Health Education Center (MAHEC). He received his medical degree from Vanderbilt University and is a graduate of MAHEC's Family Medicine Residency Program in Asheville. He is a Western Carolina Medical Society board member. The article is titled: "Providers and the Community Response to Opioids."

Excerpt: Many individuals and organizations in WNC have been responding to this issue for years, but now there are collective, region-wide responses to this crisis. For example, The Buncombe County Department of Health and Human Services is leading an effort to build a coalition of providers in Buncombe County, including community clinics and the hospital, to tackle this problem. VAYA Health (formerly Smoky Mountain LME), a regional health organization helping those with behavioral health and intellectual or development disabilities, is leading the effort to build a regional coalition to attack this problem for the 23 westernmost counties. There are many other individual efforts - too numerous to mention all of them in this short article - underway in hospitals, clinics and practices across WNC to address the opioid crisis.
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The program's founder and medical director, Steve North, M.D., made the transition from schoolteacher to primary care physician to telehealth program executive. Here is his story: In the 1990s North was a Teach for America corps member in rural North Carolina. He remembers seeing a student who had come to school after stepping on a nail. He couldn't concentrate on his schoolwork, and the parents had trouble getting him to a provider because they had one car and both worked two jobs. At about the same time he read a book by Joy Dryfoos called "Full Service Schools," about the idea of school-based healthcare.
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Due to the ongoing advocacy effort of a coalition of state medical societies, N.C. Medicaid has abandoned a rate cut that has been pending since Jan. 1, 2015. NCMS estimates that approximately $28 million in physician payments have been preserved.
You may recall that the General Assembly approved a 1 percent rate reduction in late 2014. The North Carolina Medical Society (NCMS) opposed the cut in the legislature and continued working to prevent its implementation while under review by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). NCMS teamed up with the NC Pediatric Society and the NC Academy of Family Physicians to show CMS the cut's potential negative impact on the ability of Medicaid patients to access care.

Now more than two years later, NC Medicaid is no longer seeking approval from CMS for the 1 percent cut, and the reduction will not be implemented now or retroactively. Had the cut been applied, physicians would have been required to repay 1 percent of their Medicaid payments from the last two years. Beyond the lost revenue, the recoupment effort likely would have affected cash flow and business operations for many Medicaid practices.

Read the memo updating the State Plan Manual with this change.

As the toll of the opioid epidemic grows, scores of doctors have lost their licenses and some have gone to prison. Pharmacies are being sued and shuttered. Pharmaceutical manufacturers are under investigation and face new rules from regulators.
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