Best Practices for Medication Utilization Evaluations in Postsurgical Pain Management

PURPOSE: The purpose of this review is to provide guidance that aids in the practical design, implementation, and analysis of medication use evaluations (MUEs) for postsurgical pain management. SUMMARY: Clinicians have long employed drug use evaluations or drug utilization reviews to ensure the safe and appropriate use of medications in a hospital, medical practice, or other healthcare setting. Although these approaches are valuable, there is a growing trend toward replacing these methods with the MUE, a performance improvement tool that focuses on assessing and improving medication use processes or medication treatment response with the goal of optimizing patient outcomes. Utilizing MUEs to assess patient outcomes and quality of life can be challenging in certain therapeutic areas such as pain management, where measurements of pain can be quantitative but are inherently subjective. Currently, there is little guidance on the development of MUEs that balance subjective and objective outcomes. CONCLUSION: MUEs continue to become the standard for quality improvement for optimizing care and ensuring optimal outcomes. This review of the literature provides guidance in post-surgical pain management, an area that requires measurement of both subjective and objective outcomes.