Worries that surgery patients would have a tougher recovery if their doctors had to abide by a five-day limit on opioid pain medication prescriptions didn't play out as expected, a new study finds.
Instead, patient-reported pain levels and satisfaction didn't change at all for Michigan adults who had their appendix or gallbladder removed, a hernia repaired, a hysterectomy or other common operations after the state's largest insurer put the limit in place, the study shows.
It's published in JAMA Health Forum by a team from Michigan Medicine, the University of Michigan's academic medical center. Opioid prescribing limits are now everywhere, so understanding their effects is crucial. We know these limits can reduce opioid prescribing, but it hasn't been clear until now whether they can do so without worsening patient experience.
How the study was done For the new study, Chua and colleagues used data from the Michigan Surgical Quality Collaborative, which collects data on patients having common operations at 70 Michigan hospitals. In all, they were able to look at opioid prescribing and patient experience data from 1,323 BCBSM patients who had common operations in the 13 months before the five-day limit went into effect, and 4,722 patients who had operations in the 20 months after the limit went into effect.
The percentage of prescribers who prescribed opioids to their patients having these operations did not change, but the percentage of patients who filled a prescription for an opioid did, possibly because pharmacists rejected prescriptions that weren't compliant with the BCBSM limit, Chua speculates.
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