Last summer the Department of Health (DOH) signed a three-year extension on our contract with Appriss for the continued operation of the Washington State Prescription Monitoring Program (PMP) system. As a part of this contract extension, DOH determined that an upgrade from the legacy system, RxSentry, to the newest platform, AWARxE, was necessary to ensure the continued operation of Washington’s PMP system.
Over the past 8 months, DOH has been planning and testing the system to prepare for an April 21, 2020 go-live. DOH is excited to implement Appriss’ AWARxE platform as AWARxE will offer updated metrics, faster processing speeds for data entry and queries, and a 24/7 customer service helpdesk. This upgrade will help to ensure that our system and staff are maximizing both productivity and efficiency.
We recognize that over the last few weeks COVID-19 has had a growing impact on the healthcare system across our state and the world in general. While we do understand the issues this is creating we are moving forward with the upgrade and still plan to go live with the AWARxE system in exactly 2 weeks, on April 21. We believe that this upgrade process will be relatively simple on the end user's side and hope it does not create further issues for our already taxed healthcare workers.
We would appreciate if you can please forward this message to all your members. Any current PMP users may have already seen an initial upgrade communication asking them to log into RxSentry to make sure their account is up-to-date so that it can be migrated over to the new system. The second round of communications is going out to users today and will remind them to make sure their account is up to date.
If you have any questions about this change, please contact Washington State PMP at prescriptionmonitoring@doh.wa.gov.