EHR information indicates reduction in opioids prescription by doctors

As the opioid issues reaches epidemic proportions, latest electronic heath record data show that physicians are giving opioids prescription to fewer sufferers, and they are also being stingy when it comes to prescribing drugs to treat opioid dependence.

Athenahealth, a cloud-based electronic health record (EHR) vendor, observed data from more than 2 million sufferer visits from the first quarter of 2014 to the first quarter of 2017 year.

While the misuse of opioids prescription has emerged as an urgent public health crisis, what researchers discovered is that opioids prescription have been steadily reducing over that time period.

“We have seen doctor prescribing patterns decreasing,” claims Josh Gray, vice president of athenaResearch. “It is been specifically notable, for instance, that orthopedic surgeons and primary care physicians have seen decline.”

Based on the EHR data, both orthopedic surgeons and primary care physicians are prescribing opioids to fewer patients.

At the similar time, Gray points out that more sufferers have opioid addictions but there has only been a slight increase in providers prescribing drugs to treat opioid dependence, which he observes as a troubling development.

“If you are a doctor and you are reducing the frequency with which you give patients opioids prescription, some of those sufferers might be dependent,” observes Gray. “You would like to think that at least the healthcare system would be giving medication-assisted treatment to patients that are addressing with dependence or active addiction.”

He adds that the proportion of doctors in athenaResearch’s dataset that prescribe buprenorphine, a medication that decreases or eliminates withdrawal symptoms linked with opioid dependence, has “barely nudged up” which Gray explains as a “terrible” trend.

“Doctors are being much more parsimonious in terms of opioids perscription, but the accessibility to medication-assisted treatment—such as buprenorphine and similar pharmaceutical compounds—is not increasing,” in accordance to Gray. “I am not a physician, but that might be one of the reasons we are seeing continued immensely high levels, if not increases, in overdose deaths. It is not that difficult to procure opioids illegally. So, sufferers who are dependent that cannot get medication to treat their dependence then go to other sources that are not medically supervised, which is highly dangerous.”

Since the year of 2000, more than 300,000 Americans have lost their lives to an overdose from either prescription or illicit opioids, in accordance to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC has been working to make better the opioid prescribing to reduce unessential exposure to opioids and stop addiction.

In the month of December 2016, President Obama signed the 21st Century Cures Act which provides $1 billion in new funding to combat the opioid crisis. Previous week, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, MD, announced that HHS will soon give $485 million in grants to assist states and territories target opioid addiction—the first of two rounds provided for in the Cures Act.

HHS has prioritized 5 particular areas: strengthening public health surveillance, advancing the practice of pain management, making better access to treatment and recovery services, targeting availability and distribution of overdose-reversing drugs, and supporting cutting-edge research.