THANK YOU FOR SUBSCRIBING
Weekly Brief
Be first to read the latest tech news, Industry Leader's Insights, and CIO interviews of medium and large enterprises exclusively from Healthcare Tech Outlook
Dave Henderson, CIO, Millennium HealthMillennium Health is a CAP-accredited, CLIA-certified specialty laboratory that delivers timely, accurate, and clinically-actionable information that is helping to address this crisis. Millennium’s drug testing services are used by a variety of specialties, including substance-abuse disorder and pain management providers. Dave Henderson, CIO of Millennium Health, views the issue from a technology-driven perspective and says, “By providing the healthcare community with a laboratory fully dedicated to obtaining objective information about patients through comprehensive toxicology and drug testing, we can help clinicians make more informed treatment choices for their patients.”
The laboratory specializes in medication monitoring and genetic testing, including pharmacogenetics. With a focus on improving user experiences (UX) and customer experiences (CX) for healthcare professionals and payers respectively, Henderson and his team developed a client-facing order management platform that was designed with inspiration drawn from industry disruptors such as Uber and Nest that offer convenient services, allowing users to make choices based on real-time information via an intuitive design.
Millennium Health’s platform similarly leverages the company’s years of expertise in the clinical industry and allows it to provide meaningful insights into emerging drug use trends.
Millennium Health’s customer-centric approach to the design of forward-facing products has made the company an industry leader in the healthcare sector. This commitment includes a cloud-first approach that involves SaaS and PaaS providers that enabled it to reduce, refocus, and embed technical resources into their business teams.
Through this platform, Millennium Health can integrate several disparate data feeds to offer relevant information in real time as healthcare providers interact with the system. The company can empower clinicians to actively engage with their patient and payer data to make more informed choices about medications and treatment plans, and gain greater awareness of regional and national trends while providing enhanced value to customers by encouraging compliance with payer policies.
From these efforts, the company now has a unified and focused vision that supports the output of tailored, customer-facing initiatives, including peer-reviewed publications that yield new insights into patient care, and a proprietary customer platform and clinical intelligence tool. Additionally, leveraging its platform—which is a blend of the industry’s standard order management practices and the organization’s extensive clinical expertise—the company was able to conduct two nationwide studies on illicit and prescription drug trends, the Millennium Health Signals Report™ and another published by JAMA Network Open. Both studies were made possible by feeding raw data into the company’s platform to produce insightful information through the power of analytics.
The company communicates with its customers actively in its effort to highlight the value of comprehensive medication monitoring and pharmacogenetic testing for a healthcare provider. Moving forward, Millennium Health will continue to innovate on modern-day technologies for providing real-time ordering capabilities through its interactive platform, Intellium℠.
Company
Millennium Health
Management
Dave Henderson, CIO, Andrew A. Lukowiak Ph.D., CEO, Millennium Health
Description
Founded more than a decade ago, Millenium Health is a pioneer in drug testing services.
The company's unique service suite enables clinicians and medical practitioners
to monitor the use of prescription medications and illicit drugs, and assess
the degree of impact treatment plans could make. The three most noteworthy
services of Millenium Health's that deserve a special mention are MILLENIUMPGT,
MILLENIUMUDT, and intellium. While MILLENIUMPGT facilitates effective
Pharmacogenetic testing, intellium and MILLENIUMUDT plays a vital role
in Urine Drug Testing & Oral Fluid drug Testing.
Millennium Health News
Xylazine Has Spread to Every Region of the Country, Millennium Health Signals Report™ Shows
SAN DIEGO - Millennium Health Signals Report released today, the powerful, veterinary tranquilizer xylazine—also known as “tranq”—was detected in urine drug tests from every region of the country, with the highest rates in the Eastern U.S. This analysis of the nationwide spread of xylazine is the most current and substantiative to date since xylazine use rose to prominence.
“Increased awareness of the threats posed by xylazine is needed among clinicians and public health officials across the U.S. and geographical changes in xylazine use should be monitored closely with timely and reliable sources of surveillance data,” says Scott Walton, CEO. “Although xylazine use among those who use fentanyl is currently concentrated in the East, a 2022 DEA report suggested that xylazine appears to be following the same east-to-west path as fentanyl. Time will tell if this becomes the case. We will continue to closely monitor xylazine and provide real-time updates about any shifting use as part of our commitment to help prevent drug overdose deaths.”
According to Dr. Leonard Kamen, a Clinical Associate Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Sidney Kimmel Medical College, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, the presence of xylazine has had a devastating impact on our local community. This has led to numerous challenges, primarily because there are currently no approved treatments specifically designed for xylazine use, nor are there any overdose reversal agents tailored for xylazine-involved overdoses. Dr. Kamen emphasizes the importance of clinicians closely monitoring patients who report unusual drug effects, particularly when they believed they were consuming fentanyl. Additionally, those who exhibit characteristic skin wounds associated with xylazine use should also receive careful attention.
The report also highlights the significant prevalence of polysubstance use among individuals testing positive for both fentanyl and xylazine, in contrast to those who have only used fentanyl. Specifically, individuals who had used both fentanyl and xylazine showed higher rates of prescription opioid, heroin, gabapentin, benzodiazepine, cocaine, fentanyl analogue, and methamphetamine use.
“This is a substance no human being was meant to ingest and often people may be exposed to it without their knowledge, which increases the risk. Though the effects of xylazine cannot be reversed using naloxone, xylazine often is used alongside opioids, which naloxone can reverse, so it should be administered in a suspected overdose," said Chief Clinical Officer Dr. Angela G. Huskey at Millennium Health. “This is a dangerous situation, and it’s spreading rapidly. We are trying to sound the alarm on the need to integrate clinical monitoring into our national response so we can provide advance warning and know in real-time where people need help.”
The Millennium Health Signals Report™ offers a comprehensive overview of the illicit drug use epidemic in the United States and is derived from the insights provided by Millennium Health's Emerging Threat Intelligence (ETI) Program™. This program is dedicated to real-time monitoring of drug use trends, serving as a valuable resource for clinicians, researchers, public health authorities, and policymakers in addressing the alarming surge in drug overdose fatalities.
Methodology: The Millennium Health Signals Report, titled "Zeroing in on Xylazine: The First 100 Days After U.S. Emerging Threat Designation," is based on an analysis of urine drug test results obtained from a dataset comprising over 160,000 specimens collected between April 12th and July 20th, 2023. Millennium Health conducted an examination of Xylazine Urine Drug Test (UDT) positivity within the population using fentanyl, categorized by U.S. Census Divisions. Additionally, the report assessed the co-detection of nine illicit or non-prescribed drug classes in cases with and without the presence of xylazine. Detailed information on U.S. Census Regions and the statistical methods employed by Millennium Health is available upon request.