Overcoming challenges of prescribing long-term opioid therapy in residency clinics

To describe the impact of a standardized opioid prescribing intervention when implemented in three family medicine (FM) residency training - clinics-environments that face operational challenges including regular resident turnover.

We performed a retrospective cohort study to compare patterns of long-term opioid prescribing between residency and nonresidency clinics.

This study took place within a large, academic, health system.

Three FM residency clinics were compared with three nonresidency FM clinics.

A standardized opioid prescribing process was developed and implemented within the FM residency clinics. Nonresidency clinics used an independent process and were not exposed to the intervention.

Descriptive comparisons were performed for treatment and control clinics' opioid prescribing from 2015 to 2018. The primary outcome was a patient's annual opioid exposure supplied from these select clinics. We also examine coprescribing with high-risk medications that potentiate the overdose risk of opioid prescriptions. Difference-in-difference modeling was used to control for clinic-level variation in practice.

Statistically significant decreases were observed in both residency and nonresidency clinics for the mean number of opioid prescriptions and the mean daily morphine milligram equivalent. These decreases were comparable between the residency and nonresidency clinics.

Residency clinics face unique challenges and require innovative solutions to keep up with best practices in opioid prescribing. Our residency clinics' implementation of a standardized intervention, including electronic health record integration, standardized processes, and metric management, suggests steps that may be valuable in achieving outcomes comparable to nonresidency clinics in large health systems.