The Iowa Poison Control Center is setting up a program to provide round-the-clock clinical advice to healthcare professionals treating patients who’ve overdosed on opioids or have an opioid addiction. It’s financed with a grant from the state’s opioid settlement fund, which is getting $186 million from pharmacy chains and drug companies.
Dr. Daniel McCabe, medical director of the Iowa Poison Control Center, said the center has always been available to provide advice about treating patients with substance use disorders, but the grant will help set up a more formal process “to provide guidelines to bedside teams, to provide local support and connect them to local providers that can see these patients as outpatients, so it just felt like a perfect marriage to use the opioid settlement to truly help Iowans throughout the state.”
The program is called I-BEACON. It will not only make clinicians like Dr. McCabe available for consultations, but will provide advice about a medication, called buprenorphine, that’s used to treat patients with an opioid use disorder. “Getting them in treatment allows them to function better within their family, have better relationships with their family and friends, allows them to function better at work, contribute to their neighborhoods and their community,” McCabe said. “This is just a safe way to not only keep people alive — which is our number one goal, but to allow people to re-enter their life.”
While many doctors can prescribe buprenorphine to treat a patient with an opioid addition, but they may not be able to get immediate advice from an expert about how to monitor a patient’s use or treat an adverse reaction. McCabe said the Iowa Poison Control Hotline will now be that 24/7, 365 days a year resource. “We can help guide them through the dosing and all the other affects that they should be waiting for,” McCabe said. “…We’re trying to build a database of all the prescribers in the state that can see these patients after the fact, because if we merely just start the medication and there’s no place for these patients to follow up with in a couple of weeks, then we’re only putting a band-aid on the situation.”
McCabe, an emergency medicine specialist at University of Iowa Health Care, said the ERs throughout the state see “numerous” patients every day who suffer from an opioid use disorder. The Centers for Disease Control estimates 17,000 Iowans have become addicted to opioids. The latest report from the Iowa Department of Public Safety shows there were 172 opioid-related deaths in Iowa in 2024.