High-risk and Long-term Opioid Prescribing to Military Spouses in the Millennium Cohort Family Study.

Introduction: The use and misuse of opioids by active service members has been examined in several studies, but little is known about their spouses' opioid use. This study estimates the number of military spouses who received high-risk or long-term opioid prescriptions between 2010 and 2014, and addresses how the Military Health System can help prevent risky prescribing in order to improve military force readiness.

Materials And Methods: This study used data from the Millennium Cohort Family Study, a nationwide survey of 9,872 spouses of service members with 2 to 5 years of military service, augmented with information from the military's Pharmacy Data Transaction Service about prescriptions for controlled drugs dispensed to these service members' spouses.

An Experimental Test of the Effectiveness of Unsolicited Reporting by a Prescription Drug Monitoring Program in Reducing Inappropriate Acquisition of Opioids.

Objectives: This research looked at whether notifying prescribers and pharmacies about patients who use multiple providers to obtain opioids reduces their prescribing activity (including use of multiple providers, numbers of opioid prescriptions, or amounts of opioids obtained).

Design: Nevada's prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP) identified patients using multiple providers to obtain opioids and assigned them alternately to an intervention or control group. Controlled substance prescription histories were sent only to intervention patients' providers.

The ecology of prescription opioid abuse in the USA: geographic variation in patients' use of multiple prescribers ("doctor shopping").

Purpose: This study estimates the prevalence in US counties of opioid patients who use large numbers of prescribers, the amounts of opioids they obtain, and the extent to which their prevalence is predicted by ecological attributes of counties, including general medical exposure to opioids.

Methods: Finite mixture models were used to estimate the size of an outlier subpopulation of patients with suspiciously large numbers of prescribers (probable doctor shoppers), using a sample of 146 million opioid prescriptions dispensed during 2008. Ordinary least squares regression models of county-level shopper rates included independent variables measuring ecological attributes of counties, including rates of patients prescribed opioids, socioeconomic characteristics of the resident population, supply of physicians, and measures of healthcare service utilization.

Geographic variation and disparity in stimulant treatment of adults and children in the United States in 2008.

OBJECTIVE This study estimated the prevalence of stimulant treatment among both adults and children at national, state, and county levels during 2008 and explored explanations for wide variations in treatment prevalence. METHODS Records of 24.1 million stimulant prescriptions dispensed to insured and uninsured patients were obtained from approximately 76% of U.

Estimating the prevalence of opioid diversion by "doctor shoppers" in the United States.

Background: Abuse of prescription opioid analgesics is a serious threat to public health, resulting in rising numbers of overdose deaths and admissions to emergency departments and treatment facilities. Absent adequate patient information systems, "doctor shopping" patients can obtain multiple opioid prescriptions for nonmedical use from different unknowing physicians. Our study estimates the prevalence of doctor shopping in the US and the amounts and types of opioids involved.

Geographic variation in opioid prescribing in the U.S.

Unlabelled: Estimates of geographic variation among states and counties in the prevalence of opioid prescribing are developed using data from a large (135 million) representative national sample of opioid prescriptions dispensed during 2008 by 37,000 retail pharmacies. Statistical analyses are used to estimate the extent to which county variation is explained by characteristics of resident populations, their healthcare utilization, proxy measures of morbidity, availability of healthcare resources, and prescription monitoring laws. Geographic variation in prevalence of prescribed opioids is large, greater than the variation observed for other healthcare services.