West Virginia's two U.S. senators have introduced a bill that would try to prevent the misunderstanding that led to a Charleston woman's overdose on opioid pain pills earlier this year.
"Jessie's Law," named after Jessica Grubb, would require a hospital patient's history of opioid addiction to be prominently featured in his or her medical records, if the patient gives permission.
Grubb died in March after she went to a hospital for a fairly routine surgery. She and her parents repeatedly told doctors that she was in recovery from heroin addiction and shouldn't be given opioids, except under the strictest supervision.
But her discharging doctor never got the message.
He prescribed Grubb 50 oxycodone pills. She filled the prescription at the hospital pharmacy, and she overdosed that night.
"It's just too great a temptation and it's just a thing that never, ever should have been put in front of her," her father, David Grubb, said at the time. "She went home with, in essence, a loaded gun."
The new legislation, spearheaded by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, would try to put an end to such miscommunication.
"You just can't believe that this could have happened, that common sense couldn't have prevailed," Manchin said in a conference call Wednesday. "The dispensing doctor, the doctor that discharged, he had no way of knowing because that information wasn't passed down."
Grubb's story gained national attention after her father, a former West Virginia legislator, told President Barack Obama of her struggle with addiction at an event in Charleston last fall.
At the time, she was in her fourth stint of rehab.
Grubb's story, by all accounts, had a profound impact on the president, and played a significant role in his administration's recent effort to devote more resources to the opioid epidemic.
"Your willingness to share your family's story left a powerful impression on me, and has helped accelerate efforts to deal with this national epidemic of addiction," Obama said in a handwritten note to David Grubb last month.
The new bill requires the Department of Health and Human Services to come up with standards for how a patient's addiction history should be displayed on medical records.
David Grubb said that, after Jessie's death, the family was told that her addiction history was in the records but that it was buried near the back and the discharging doctor never saw it.
"It wasn't prominently displayed, the way an allergy would be, on the front page," he said Wednesday. "If he'd known, he would not have prescribed oxycodone."
Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito is co-sponsoring the bill and noted addiction's effect on entire families.
"It's not just that person, it's not just that child; it's the whole family," she said. "This law will not just rely on a recovering addict to bring forth that information, but it does open the doors for parents and support groups to get that information onto a hospital record."
Manchin said he expects the bill to have overwhelming bipartisan support and hopes it will be passed by the end of the year.
It is the latest effort by West Virginia's congressional delegation to combat the opioid epidemic.
Republican Rep. Alex Mooney recently introduced a bill that aims to eliminate an incentive that might be causing doctors and hospitals to over-prescribe pain medication. The bill removes some mandatory questions from a survey that patients receive when they leave the hospital.
The Affordable Care Act, in an effort to improve hospital performance and quality of care, used the survey answers, in part, to determine the level of Medicare and Medicaid payments that hospitals get.
Because three of the questions asked about pain management, they could place pressure on doctors and hospitals to prescribe pain medication, pleasing patients and improving survey results for the hospital.
Mooney's legislation, co-sponsored by Manchin, Capito and Reps. David McKinley and Evan Jenkins, both R-W.Va., simply removes those three questions from the survey.
On Wednesday, a House committee passed a Jenkins-sponsored bill that aims to improve access to care for babies born with neonatal abstinence syndrome to drug-addicted mothers.
The bill would identify obstacles to care for such babies.
Additionally, the Obama administration has proposed more than $1 billion in new funding for drug treatment while, at the same time, taking steps to increase private-sector funding and to reduce over-prescription of opioids.
"We've got many steps to go to fight this epidemic; it's a multi-faceted approach we have to take," Manchin said. "How do we put the genie back into its box?"
Reach David Gutman at david.gutman@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5119 or follow @davidlgutman on Twitter.