Satisfaction with Health Care Among Prescription Opioid Recipients

Prior studies examining the association of opioid prescriptions with satisfaction with care involved limited, selected samples with mixed findings. We examined this issue, of relevance to reducing discretionary opioid prescribing, in a US representative sample.

We performed an observational study of adults (N = 69,985) enrolled in the 2005 to 2015 US Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys. We examined the association of high (top quartile) satisfaction with receipt of 0, 1 to 5, or ≥6 opioid prescriptions per year. The base model adjusted for demographics and year; the full model added adjustment for health status (12-item Short Form Survey). A sensitivity analysis further adjusted for outpatient visits.

In the base model, respondents who received 1 to 5 or ≥6 opioid prescriptions were each less likely to have high satisfaction than those who received no opioid prescriptions (adjusted odds ratios [AORs] [95% CIs] 0.83 [0.79-0.88] and 0.70 [0.63-0.79], respectively). After adding health status adjustment, compared with respondents receiving no opioid prescriptions, those receiving 1 to 5 were similarly likely and those reporting ≥6 were more likely to have high satisfaction (AORs [95% CIs] 1.00 [0.94-1.06] and 1.44 [1.27-1.63], respectively). The findings were not substantively affected by further adjustment for outpatient visits.

In a US national sample, individuals who received ≥6 opioid prescriptions in a year were more likely to have top quartile satisfaction than those receiving fewer or no opioid prescriptions after accounting for health status. Whether the high satisfaction among such individuals was driven by the prescriptions themselves or by other personal characteristics requires study, as do the effects of deprescribing.