Dive Brief:
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American physicians are prescribing fewer opioids and more naloxone as well as increasing prescription drug monitoring program queries as they try to combat opioid abuse and addition, the American Medical Association said in its Opioid Task Force 2018 Progress Report.
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The task force said opioid prescriptions decreased by 22% between 2013 and 2017, including a 9% drop between 2016 and 2017.
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Meanwhile, PDMP use increased 121% between 2016 and 2017, as physicians and medical professionals made more than 300 million queries last year.
Dive Insight:
Providers, payers, pharmaceutical companies, pharmacy benefit managers and policymakers have all been promoting their work in combating the opioid epidemic. Payers like Aetna, Anthem and Cigna created programs and set goals to reduce opioid prescriptions and transition members to other types of pain management.
The Trump administration has promoted funding and criminal justice measures as a way to reverse the trend. Congress is discussing legislation with a multifaceted approach that includes limiting the length of prescriptions, training, telemedicine and improving PDMPs.
The AMA doesn't support strict opioid prescription requirements for doctors. Instead, it backs medication-assisted treatment. MAT uses a combinations of medications, counseling and behavioral therapies to treat opioid use disorders.
The organization is also pushing for more doctors to get educated about the problem. The AMA said more than 50,000 physicians are certified to provide in-office buprenorphine to treat opioid use disorder. That’s a 42.2% increase over the past year.
The AMA said it urges physicians to “continue to make judicious prescribing decisions to ensure comprehensive, compassionate pain care and to talk with their patients about safe storage and disposal of all unused and unwanted medications.”
The group is additionally pushing public and private payers to remove “administrative barriers” for doctors, including prior authorization for MAT.
Other recommendations:
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Policymakers and regulators should increase oversight and enforcement of mental health and substance use disorder parity laws.
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Payers and pharmacy benefit management companies should provide access to affordable, non-opioid pain care.
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The healthcare system should provide the same care and compassion to patients with pain or substance use disorders as any other patient with a chronic medical condition.
The AMA and the American Society of Addiction Medicine recently presented a new reimbursement plan that takes aim at the opioid epidemic. They released a concept paper for an alternative payment model called the Patient-Centered Opioid Addiction Treatment (P-COAT) model. P-COAT provides financial support to successfully treat patients and broaden the coordinated delivery of medical, psychological and social support services.
Though multiple groups of stakeholders are working on programs to combat the epidemic and prescriptions are down, addiction and overdose costs have gotten worse. The Kaiser Family Foundation has said one possible reason for the added costs is the rise of illegal opioid use.