Trends in Opioid Medication Adherence During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Retrospective Cohort Study

BACKGROUND: The recent pandemic had the potential to worsen the opioid crisis through multiple effects on patients’ lives, such as the disruption of care. In particular, good levels of adherence with respect to medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD), recognized as being important for positive outcomes, may be disrupted. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to investigate whether patients on MOUD experienced a drop in medication adherence during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: This retrospective cohort study used Medicaid claims data from 6 US states from 2018 until the start of 2021. We compared medication adherence for people on MOUD before and after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Our main measure was the proportion of days covered (PDC), a score that measures patients’ adherence to their MOUD. We carried out a breakpoint analysis on PDC, followed by a patient-level beta regression analysis with PDC as the dependent variable while controlling for a set of covariates. RESULTS: A total of 79,991 PDC scores were calculated for 37,604 patients (age: mean 37.6, SD 9.8 years; sex: n=17,825, 47.4% female) between 2018 and 2021. The coefficient for the effect of COVID-19 on PDC score was –0.076 and was statistically significant (odds ratio 0.925, 95% CI 0.90-0.94). CONCLUSIONS: The COVID-19 pandemic was negatively associated with patients’ adherence to their medication, which had declined since the beginning of the pandemic.