The patient at Boston Medical Center needed painkillers, but Dr. Sara Schlotterbeck had concerns: The medical record suggested past misuse of opioids by the man.
She wanted to check the Prescription Monitoring Program, a state-run database of every prescription for controlled substances, to see whether the patient had obtained opioids from multiple providers. But Schlotterbeck, who is in her first year of residency training after completing medical school, can’t get into the database on her own.
