Utah Takes Multipronged Approach to Respond to Prescription Drug Abuse

By linking prescription monitoring program data with adverse events data (1996–2000), the Utah Department of Health learned that

• Nearly half (17 of 35) of those who died of methadone poisoning had previous methadone prescriptions
• 14 had a valid methadone prescription at the time of death
• Of those with a valid prescription, 7 were taking methadone for the first time when they died, while the rest had previous prescriptions (ranging from 1 to 17 prescriptions)

The Utah Department of Health then developed an educational campaign targeted to both prescribers and the general public about safe use, storage, and disposal of medications. The health department also convened a panel to develop practice guidelines, which were disseminated in 2009 and subsequently published. In the guidelines, methadone was singled out as a drug that requires particular care to be safely prescribed. The health department evaluated the impact of the guidelines by surveying primary care physicians.

Since the interventions began, the annual number of prescription opioid-related deaths fell for the first time since 1991, resulting in a 25% decrease between 2007 and 2011 (326 to 246 deaths respectively). Methadone prescribing also dropped after the interventions began; after peaking in 2006, the number of methadone patients fell back to 2003 levels by 2010.

Analyses are in progress to determine whether providers have changed their prescribing practices and to examine the association between provider-level prescribing and adverse events. Given that the interventions occurred concurrently, observed changes in drug-related harm and prescribing practices cannot be credited conclusively to a particular intervention.

Utah learned a number of key lessons through this process:

• Prescription drug-related harms have affected thousands of Utah families, and the community must be part of intervention efforts.
• Providers desire more training about safe prescribing and tools to help assess risk, and prefer using tools that are easily available within electronic medical records rather than external tools.
• Linking prescription monitoring program data with adverse events data allows for more sophisticated analyses of patient- and provider-level exposures and outcomes.
• Adding patient diagnoses to the data set would help inform risk assessment efforts.
• Linking data about physician practice groups to the prescription monitoring program would help distinguish “doctor shoppers” from legitimate patients receiving prescriptions from multiple providers in the same group.