# Inpatient Opioid Safety Act of 2021

This bill requires hospitals to monitor patients' breathing when they receive opioid painkillers during hospital stays. Specifically, starting July 2022, any hospital that accepts Medicare or Medicaid payments must use continuous electronic monitors on patients receiving opioids (whether through pills, injections, or other methods) for at least 12 hours after the opioid is given, or until they're discharged—whichever comes first. These monitors track oxygen levels and breathing patterns to catch dangerous drops in respiration before they become life-threatening.

The monitoring requirement applies to both Medicare (the federal insurance program for seniors and some disabled people) and Medicaid (the joint federal-state program for lower-income individuals). Hospitals must use monitors that can detect when opioids are dangerously slowing someone's breathing, can be adjusted to avoid too many false alarms, and can record and share information about the patient's oxygen and breathing. There's one important exception: if a doctor treating the patient decides that monitoring would actually be harmful or inappropriate for that specific person, they can skip it—but they have to document this decision in the patient's medical records.

The practical effect is that patients receiving opioids in hospitals will have their breathing watched electronically rather than relying only on nurses checking on them periodically. This is meant to prevent opioid-induced respiratory depression, which is when opioids slow breathing so much that it becomes dangerous or fatal. For patients, this means more intensive monitoring but also potentially catching serious problems faster. For hospitals, it means investing in monitoring equipment and training staff to use it properly.

Inpatient Opioid Safety Act of 2021

Kuster, Ann M.

Inpatient Opioid Safety Act of 2021 This bill requires hospitals, as a condition of Medicare and Medicaid participation, to use specified technology to monitor patients for opioid-induced respiratory depression for 12 hours after the administration of an opioid or until the patient is discharged, whichever is earlier, unless a health care practitioner determines before administering an opioid that such monitoring should not be used and records this determination in the patient's record.