Reducing opioid prescriptions does not increase rate of refills or new opioid requests: evidence from a randomized trial.

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

Physician overprescribing of opioids contributes to chronic opioid use, overdose risk, and the accumulation of unused opioids in the community. While many interventions seek to reduce initial post-operative opioid prescriptions, concerns remain that doing so may lead to increased refill or new prescription requests, and result in inadequate pain management.

Methods

We conducted a three-arm cluster-randomized trial involving 640 surgeons across three surgical specialties in 19 hospitals to evaluate the impact of guideline-based prescribing interventions. In this secondary analysis, we examined whether exposure to the intervention led to no increase in refills within six months, measured by relative risk ratio, which incorporated survival analysis to estimate the

SUBMITTER: Yan X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12911919 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature