Primary Care Providers’ Judgments of Opioid Analgesic Misuse in a Community-Based Cohort of HIV-Infected Indigent Adults

BACKGROUND: Primary care providers (PCPs) must balance treatment of chronic non-cancer pain with opioid analgesics with concerns about opioid misuse. OBJECTIVE: We co-enrolled community-based indigent adults and their PCPs to determine PCPs’ accuracy of estimating opioid analgesic misuse and illicit substance use. DESIGN: Patient-provider dyad study. PARTICIPANTS: HIV-infected, community-based indigent adults (‘patients’) and their PCPs. MAIN MEASURES: Using structured interviews, we queried patients on use and misuse of opioid analgesics and illicit substances. PCPs completed patient- and provider-specific questionnaires. We calculated the sensitivity, specificity, and measures of agreement between PCPs’ judgments and patients’ reports of opioid misuse and illicit substance use. We examined factors associated with PCPs’ thinking that their patients had misused opioid analgesics and determined factors associated with patients’ misuse. KEY RESULTS: We had 105 patient-provider dyads. Of the patients, 21 had misused opioids and 45 had used illicit substances in the past year. The sensitivity of PCPs’ judgments of opioid analgesic misuse was 61.9% and specificity, 53.6% (Kappa score 0.09, p = 0.10). The sensitivity of PCPs’ judgments of illicit substance use was 71.1% and specificity, 66.7% (Kappa score 0.37, p <0.001). PCPs were more likely to think that younger patients (Adjusted odds ratio (AOR) 0.89, 95% CI 0.84-0.97), African American patients (AOR 2.53, 95% CI 1.05-6.07) and those who had used illicit substances in the past year (AOR 3.33, 95% CI 1.35-8.20) had misused opioids. Younger (AOR 0.94, 95% CI 0.86-1.02) and African American (AOR 0.71, 95% CI 0.25-1.97) patients were not more likely to report misuse, whereas persons who had used illicit substances were (AOR 3.01, 95% CI 1.04-8.76). CONCLUSION: PCPs’ impressions of misuse were discordant with patients’ self-reports of opioid analgesic misuse. PCPs incorrectly used age and race as predictors of misuse in this high-risk cohort.