A congressional committee has approved a bill to require the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to study how prevalent drug testing for marijuana, fentanyl and other drugs is in hospital emergency departments.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee advanced the legislation in a unanimous 46-0 vote last week. The measure from Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) is known as “Tyler’s Law,” after Tyler Shamash, a 19-year-old who died following a fentanyl ingestion in 2018 and was not tested for the drug when brought to the hospital for a suspected overdose.
The panel’s Subcommittee on Health previously approved the bill last month.
While the legislation, H.R. 2004, is largely focused on fentanyl, it says that within a year of passage the HHS secretary would need to complete a study to determine “how frequently hospital emergency departments test for fentanyl (in addition to testing for other substances such as amphetamines, phencyclidine, cocaine, opiates, and marijuana) when a patient is experiencing an overdose.”
The study would also need to look at costs associated with fentanyl testing, the potential benefits and risks of such testing and how it may impact patients’ experiences—including with respect to confidentiality and privacy protections and the patient-physician relationship.
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