Information on doctor and pharmacy shopping for opioids adds little to the identification of presumptive opioid abuse disorders in health insurance claims data.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Doctor and pharmacy shopping ("Shopping") for opioids is related to opioid abuse and is associated with opioid overdose and death. Lacking identifiers for prescribers and pharmacies, many data resources (notably the US FDA's Sentinel System) cannot evaluate Shopping. We used data in which presumptive Shopping could be identified. We investigated whether US health insurance claims data could perform as well as Shopping to identify people with evidence for opioid abuse.

Methods

In this cross-sectional study, we examined health insurance claims from 164,923 persons with at least two dispensing of opioids in 18 months, the first occurring in 2012. Evidence for the presence of a possible opioid abuse disorder was drawn from predictive patterns of drug fills, diagnoses

SUBMITTER: Walker AM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6682178 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature