Assessment of Opioid Prescribing Practices Before and After Implementation of a Health System Intervention to Reduce Opioid Overprescribing

IMPORTANCE: Overprescribing of opioids has generated and sustains the opioid overdose epidemic. Health systems have a responsibility to lead the effort to reduce overprescribing. OBJECTIVE: To measure the effects of multilevel interventions on opioid prescribing within a health system. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: Quality improvement study comparing a 6-month preintervention baseline with a 16-month postintervention period ending in April 2018. Inpatient and outpatient clinical activity within a regional health system including an acute care hospital, same-day surgery, and outpatient clinics. Opioid prescribing activity by hundreds of clinicians involving over a million clinical encounters was measured using a health system’s electronic medical record. INTERVENTIONS: Multiple parallel interventions in different domains, including prescriber education and accountability, enhanced oversight via measurement of individual prescribers, tools to right-size postoperative discharge prescriptions, reduction of default amounts on standard opioid prescription orders, and professionally written patient and public education about opioid risks and alternatives. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: Morphine milligram equivalents (MME) per encounter per month, MME per opioid prescription, and rate of opioid prescriptions (opioid prescriptions per encounter per month). RESULTS: More than 44 000 clinical encounters per month were recorded. All baseline trends were not significantly different from 0. Total health system MME per encounter decreased 1.0 MME per encounter per month. At the end of the postintervention observation period, the monthly MME per encounter was 58% lower than the average of the 6-month baseline, the MME per opioid prescription per month was 34% less than the average of the baseline, and the opioid prescription rate was 38% lower than the average of the baseline. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: Opioid overprescribing was reduced with multifocal interventions targeting patient and public demand, creating prescriber awareness and accountability, and creating tools for clinical leadership accountability. The interventions described are adoptable by most organized health systems. Reducing total opioid supply within communities should be given high priority by those with a mission to protect and improve public health.