While prescriptions for opioid pain relievers were strong in specialties for pain, anesthesia, and earthy medicine and rehabilitation, it was ubiquitous practitioners who dominated sum prescriptions among Medicare prescribers formed on perfect volume, according to an essay published online by JAMA Internal Medicine.
Researchers have suggested tiny groups of inclusive prescribers and tablet mills expostulate a opioid overdose epidemic. Medicare information yield an event to inspect prescribing patterns opposite a inhabitant population.
Anna Lembke, M.D., of Stanford University, Stanford, Calif., and coauthors examined information from particular prescribers including physicians, helper practitioners, medicine assistants and dentists from medication drug coverage claims in a 2013 Medicare Part D claims information set. About 68 percent of a 50 million people on Medicare are lonesome by Part D.
The information paint some-more than 1.1 billion claims for scarcely $81 billion. The authors focused on opioid prescriptions containing hydrocodone, oxycodone, fentanyl, morphine, methadone, hydromorphone, oxymorphone, meperidine, codeine, drug or levorphanol.
Based on claims per prescriber type, opioid prescriptions were strong in interventional pain government (1,124.9), pain government (921.1), anesthesiology (484.2) and earthy medicine and reconstruction (348.2) specialties, according to a results.
However, formed on sum claims, family use (15.3 million), inner medicine (12.8 million), helper practitioner (4.1 million) and physician
