- The excessive prescription of high doses of opioids for common pain-related conditions is regarded as one of the contributing factors to the increase in opioid addiction and overdose deaths.
- Measures to deter the overprescription of opioids, such as state restrictions on opioid prescriptions, have shown limited success in reducing the prescribing of opioids by healthcare providers.
- A recent study shows that a letter informing healthcare providers about the fatal overdose of their patient to whom they had previously prescribed opioids resulted in a sustained decrease in the prescription of opioids in the one-year period after receiving the letter.
The letter notified clinicians of the recent overdose death of a patient to whom they had previously prescribed opioids. The communication also included measures for safely prescribing opioids.
Researchers say this type of letter presents a low-cost intervention that can help modify clinician behavior.
“This study is an interesting follow-up to an important trial by the same authors published in Science in 2018 that made a big splash, said Dr. Michael Lawrence Barnett, an associate professor of health policy and management at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Massachusetts.
“They sent letters to prescribers who had a patient die from an opioid overdose and, in the original study, observed a decrease in opioid prescribing three months after prescribers got the letter,” he told Medical News Today. “This study shows that the effects were still persistent up to 12 months out from the initial letter, though the difference between the treatment and control groups diminished.”
“The study shows that one letter has effects that last an entire year. Clinicians likely internalized the…
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