EVALUATION OF STATE-MANDATED ACUTE AND POST-SURGICAL PAIN-SPECIFIC CDC OPIOID PRESCRIBING GUIDELINES

PROJECT SUMMARYPrescription opioid overdoses claimed 17,087 lives in the United States in 2016, more than in any previousyear. In addition, the US experiences more than 1,000 emergency department visits every day fromcomplications from prescription opioids. These adverse outcomes reflect the US's current high prevalence ofopioid prescribing. Note that about 20% of the US adults receive one or more opioid prescriptions each year. InMarch 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released national opioid prescribingguidelines for chronic non-cancer pain to address the overprescribing of opioids. The guidelines include aspecific guideline for acute pain recommending that for most acute pain, a prescription of 3 days of outpatientopioid pain reliever (OPR) should be sufficient and more than 7 days would rarely be needed. The CDCguidelines include a call to evaluate the effect of implementation of the guidelines. In June 2017, NorthCarolina's STrengthen Opioid Misuse Prevention (STOP) act mandated CDC guidelines for acute and post-surgical pain, effective January 1 2018. This act legislatively limited first outpatient OPR prescriptions to a) ≤ 5days for acute pain, and b) ≤ 7 days for post-surgical pain. The overall goal of this study is to conduct animpact and process evaluation of North Carolina's legislative mandate of the CDC opioid prescribing guidelinesfor acute and post-surgical pain. While five other states have also adopted similar laws, North Carolina (NC)provides an optimal setting for examining the effect of this opioid prescribing guideline because NC's STOP actprescribing mandate is most closely aligned with the CDC opioid prescribing guideline for acute pain. In thisstudy, we will used mixed methods to conduct 1) a quasi-experimental impact evaluation and 2) a qualitativeprocess evaluation of the implementation of state mandated CDC opioid prescribing guideline for acute andpost-surgical pain in NC. We will use existing electronic health records data from three large integratedhealthcare delivery systems in NC and Tennessee (TN). We will link NC and TN electronic health records from2010 to 2020 to each state's prescription drug monitoring program and death records. The linked data from >2million acute and post-surgical pain patients who received opioids for pain control will be used in a comparativeinterrupted time series analysis. Essentially, we will conduct 2-group pre/post policy evaluation in which onestate (NC) will serve as pre/post intervention and the other state (TN) will serve as control (TN does not have asimilar policy). We will use latent class growth analysis to model heterogeneity in physicians' opioid prescribingpatterns before and after implementation of the state-mandated CDC opioid prescribing guideline. We will alsoconduct a process evaluation to understand the multi-system level resources, strategies, and partnerships thatmay aid the implementation of the guidelines. Using Wandermann's interactive systems framework, the resultsfrom the impact and process evaluations will be used to develop recommendations to guide the legislativeimplementation of other CDC opioid prescribing guidelines in other states.