New Data from State Prescription Monitoring Program

 

 

North Carolina’s Health and Human Services published a most interesting data set recently: http://www.ncdhhs.gov/divisions/mhddsas/ncdcu/Prescription-Rates-by-County

This interactive map shows information, by county, of the prescribing rates for opioids, benzodiazepines, and stimulants for the years 2012 through 2015. It also includes the average morphine milligram equivalents, or MMEs.

This data was gleaned from my state’s prescription monitoring program, called the North Carolina Controlled Substance Reporting System, abbreviated NC CSRS.

Quantifying MMEs, sometimes also called MEDDs, for morphine equivalent daily dose, is a way to quantify the potency of the opioids being prescribed. For example, since fentanyl is so potent that it’s prescribed in micrograms rather than milligrams, a prescription of 10mg of fentanyl would be very different than a prescription of 10mg of hydrocodone. So using MMEs, prescribed opioids are “translated” into the potency of that dose if it were morphine.

This data is important, since the risk of opioid overdose death risk increases when patients are prescribed higher MMEs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said MME doses higher than 50mg per day should be used with great caution, since doses above this cut off are associated with higher risk of opioid overdose death.

I looked at my own county first, and found some puzzling data. For 2015, Wilkes County was fifteenth out of one hundred counties for the number of opioid pills prescribed per resident. The table said county residents were prescribed one hundred and two opioid pain pills per resident, giving an average of 1.3 opioid prescriptions per resident.

But when I looked at the 2012 data, Wilkes County averaged eighty-two pills per resident, giving an average of 1.1 opioid prescriptions per resident. In other words, the data showed more pills are being prescribed in 2015 than in 2012.

That’s disheartening.

A new pain clinic opened in late 2014, which could explain some of this data. Also, since this is data collected by the patient’s county of residence, perhaps county residents travel to physicians in other counties for prescriptions, and then bring them to Wilkes County to fill.

Then I looked at the MME, the abbreviation for morphine milligram equivalents.

Wilkes County was number one out of one hundred NC counties for highest total morphine milligram equivalents. That says our county’s residents are prescribed more opioid firepower per capita than any other county in the state.

Really? This data doesn’t feel right to me. My impression from the new patients I admit to the opioid treatment program is that area physicians are prescribing lower doses than in the past.

So I started thinking…the opioid addiction treatment program where I work has been growing, accepting more patients, and our census is a little higher than one year ago. But data from my opioid treatment program is not part of the prescription monitoring data, because we must adhere to a higher standard of confidentiality, given the stigma attached to medication-assisted treatment of opioid use disorders.

Except for the office-based buprenorphine patients. At present, they are not protected by higher levels of confidentiality and their data is part of the prescription monitoring program. I only have thirteen patients in that program in Wilkes County, but the pain clinic also prescribes much buprenorphine, for both pain and addiction.

Buprenorphine is an odd drug, since it is a partial opioid agonist with a ceiling effect at 16-24mg per day.

The American Society of Addiction Medicine published a paper giving instructions about how to calculate MME for methadone and buprenorphine. Their position paper on this issue (http://www.asam.org/docs/default-source/public-policy-statements/public-policy-statement-on-morphine-equivalent-units-morphine-milligram-equivalents.pdf?sfvrsn=0 ) says,

1. When used for the treatment of addiction, methadone and buprenorphine should be explicitly excluded from legislation, regulations, state medical board guidelines, and payer policies that attempt to reduce opioid overdose-related mortality by limiting milligram morphine equivalents (MME). Higher MME of these medications are necessary and clinically indicated for the effective treatment of addiction involving opioid.
2. State medical boards should not use MME conversions of methadone or buprenorphine dosages used in addiction treatment as the basis for investigations or disciplinary actions against prescribers.

In other words, when buprenorphine is used to treat addiction, translating the dose into MMEs is misleading. I would add that given the ceiling effect of buprenorphine, a partial opioid agonist, overdose is much less likely with this drug than with full agonists for opioid-tolerance people. And really, the risk for overdose death is the purpose for collecting MME data.

My state’s prescription monitoring program does use MMEs for buprenorphine. I’ve seen it on my office-based patient reports, and it annoyed me, knowing ASAM’s position statement about this issue. But I didn’t realize using MMEs for buprenorphine could potentially skew data until now.

What if residents of my county are prescribed more buprenorphine than other counties, both because it’s being prescribed appropriately for the high incidence of opioid use disorder in the county, and also because at least one physician group prescribes buprenorphine off-label for pain?.

To get an idea of how badly buprenorphine MMEs could skew data, I went back and looked at one of my office-based patients. The NC CSRS (our state’s prescription monitoring program) gave a MME of 360mg for a buprenorphine dose of 12mg.

That’s misleading. Morphine at a daily dose of 360mg would place a patient at infinitely more risk than buprenorphine at 12mg.

Just a few days ago, I sent an email to some of the smartest people in my state, asking them to consider this issue. As I was getting ready to post this, I heard back. The NC CSRS plans to separate office-based treatment data. I’ll update readers.

Information from the ASAM Conference: the CDC

At the recent ASAM conference, Dr. Ileana Arias, Deputy Director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spoke at a plenary session, explaining the public health impact of our epidemic of prescription drug abuse and addiction. She did a great job explaining how bad the problem of opioid addiction has become in the U.S. She also had some great slides. The above slide shows how by 2008, poisonings overtook motor vehicle accidents as the number one cause of death in the U.S. Overwhelmingly, the poisonings were drugs, and the vast majority of these drug overdose deaths involved opioids. Dr. Arias explained the ice berg phenomenon, where for each person who dies from opioid overdose death, an estimated 118 are estimated to meet the diagnosis for opioid abuse and dependency. She presented information showing that the amount of prescription opioids sold quadrupled between 1999 and 2010.

Dr. Arias spoke at our conference to encourage us and to let us know the CDC was committed to help solve our nation’s prescription opioid addiction problem.

She outlined some of the measures the CDC is taking to help prevent opioid addiction and overdose deaths.  She explained the new lock-in programs now being used by some insurance companies, where the patient can have only one doctor and one pharmacy to prescribe and fill medications. The CDC is advocating for all states to have prescription monitoring programs, and for those state programs to be linked, so that a doctor can access medications filled in other states.

Dr. Arias mentioned the progress being made in Florida, where pill mills are being shut down. Unfortunately, some pill mills have moved to other states like Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, Ohio, and – my favorote state to criticize – Tennessee.

She also spoke of the success of medication take-back days, where people drop off old medication for appropriate disposal so that it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, and she described many other actions the CDC has started.

This was all great information, familiar to those of us treating opioid addiction over the past five to ten years. I’m grateful the CDC has joined the effort to quelch this problem. Their resources and experience can help a great deal. I just wish all doctors in the country could hear her message.

The addiction medicine doctors had a chance to make comments and further suggestions to the CDC through Dr. Arias, and I was pleased to see how carefully she listened.

One of the suggestions I liked the best addressed the expense of maintaining state prescriptoin monitoring programs. Apparently these can cost around a million dollars a year to administer. One doctor said why not have the pharmaceutical companies that make and sell controlled substances pay or help pay for the monitoring programs? These companies are the main entities that have benefitted from the sales and diversion of their products; why not ask them to bear at least some of the cost for detecting the problems they cause? Genius, though it would be hard to mandate the pharmaceutical companies to do this.

One doctor suggested that law enforcement personnel be educated about the types of treatment available to opioid addicts, so they can stop being barriers toward effective treatments, namely medication-assisted treatments using buprenorphine and methadone.

Another doctor suggested the CDC promote the naloxone programs that provide kits to reverse fatal opioid overdoses. Why not help fund these projects and/or help create more? The Harm Reduction Coalition estimates there are around 155 naloxone programs in the U.S. Some are government-funded and some are privately funded, but around 10,000 fatal opioid overdoses have been reversed. Like Project Lazarus in North Carolina, many of these programs started at a grass roots level because citizens got involved.

Another doctor made the extremely common sense suggestion that the best way to allow more patients into suboxone treatment would be to allow doctors to treat more than one hundred patients at a time. At present, suboxone doctors are allowed to have no more than thirty patients on buprenorphine in their first year prescribing, and no more than one hundred after the first year. This would cost next to nothing for the government to implement, and expand treament dramatically.

One of our past ASAM presidents endorsed mandatory physician education as a requirement for maintaining medical license.

One person compared the prescription opioid addiction to HIV infection in past years, and commended the CDC on its past efforts to reduce the stigma associated with having HIV. This person asked the CDC to make public service announcements to help reduce the stigma of addiction, and encourge people to get treatment.

Another doctor asked the CDC to produce public service announcements telling people to lock up their medications, to prevent medication diversion to a teen or other person for whom it was not prescribed. This doctor also said that patients need to know that not all pain conditions require prescription opioids. He recommended telling the general public the true risks of opioid addiction, which have been downplayed. In the past, pain medicine experts underestimated the incidence of addiction in patients prescribe opioids for chronic pain for more than three months.

The CDC representative, Dr. Arias, confirmed that the CDC already has plans to make PSAs about pain pills and pain pill addiction, much like their present (and very successful) anti-smoking television PSAs.

All great information, and now let’s get the word out to all physicians, and the public too.

New Controls on Opioid Prescribing

As discussed in my last blog entry, prescription monitoring programs will help diminish our present-day epidemic of prescription opioid addiction, but these PMPs are just a start. State and federal governments are passing other laws, with the intent to reduce pain pill addiction.

For example, over the summer, Ohio enacted legislation aimed at physicians who primarily see patients prescribed opioids for chronic pain. Doctors prescribing opioids for more than 50% of their patients are now required to take periodic continuing medical education classes about the safe prescribing of opioids. These physicians are required to take a minimum of twenty hours of training every two years. Ohio also now says that physicians who own pain practices need to register with their medical board and undergo site inspections, as well as comply with patient-tracking requirements. Six other states now mandate doctors get yearly continuing education on pain management and the safe prescribing of opioids to maintain licensure from their medical boards.

Some doctors protest these measures, but this training is intensely needed. More than ten years ago, CASA (Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University) did a study that showed physicians are poorly trained to recognize and treat addictive disorders. Of doctors who were surveyed about the training they received in their residency programs, thirty-nine percent received training on how to identify drug diversion, and sixty-one percent received training on identifying prescription drug addiction. Seventy percent of the doctors surveyed said they received instruction on how to prescribe controlled substances. (1)

These findings are appalling. Thirty percent of doctors received no training on how to prescribe controlled substances in their residency programs.  Nearly a third of the doctors leaving residency – last stop for most doctors before being loosed upon the populace to practice medicine with little to no oversight – had no training on how to prescribe these potentially dangerous drugs. Sixty-two percent leaving residency had training on pain management. This means the remaining thirty-eight percent had no training on the treatment of pain.

 These doctors weren’t in specialty care. They were in family practice, internal medicine, OB/GYN, psychiatry, and orthopedic surgery. The study included physicians of all ages (fifty-three percent were under age fifty), all races (though a majority at seventy-five percent were white, three other races were represented), and all types of locations (thirty-seven percent urban, thirty percent suburban, with the remainder small towns or rural areas). This study shows that medical training in the U.S. does not, at present, do a good job of teaching doctors about two diseases that causes much disability and suffering: pain and addiction.

 Despite having relatively little training in indentifying and treating prescription pill addiction, physicians tend to be overly confident in their abilities to detect such addictions. CASA found that eighty percent of the surveyed physicians felt they were qualified to identify both drug abuse and addiction. However, in a 1998 CASA study, Under the Rug: Substance Abuse and the Mature Woman, physicians were given a case history of a 68 year old woman, with symptoms of prescription drug addiction. Only one percent of the surveyed physicians presented substance abuse as a possible diagnosis.  In a similar study, when presented with a case history suggestive of an addictive disorder, only six percent of primary care physicians listed substance abuse as a possible diagnosis. (2)

Besides being poorly educated about treatments for patients with addiction, most doctors aren’t comfortable having frank discussions about a patient’s drug misuse or addiction. Most physicians fear they will provoke anger or shame in their patients. Physicians may feel disgust with addicted patients and find them unpleasant, demanding, or even frightening. Conversely, doctors can feel too embarrassed to ask seemingly “nice” people about addiction. In a CASA study titled, Missed Opportunity, forty-seven percent of physicians in primary care said it was difficult to discuss prescription drug addiction and abuse with their patients for whom they had prescribed such drugs.

From this data, it’s clear physicians are poorly educated about the disease of addiction, as well as the safe treatment of pain. Medical schools and residencies need to critically re-evaluate their teaching priorities to include training in pain management and addiction. Until that can be done, states need to mandate yearly training for physicians on these topics, because most practicing physicians never got adequate training on these topics.

Most doctors are not happy about these government mandates. It’s human nature to resent being told you need more training, especially if it’s at your own expense. It’s difficult to get time off work for trainings and it’s inconvenient. Yet the alternative – no increase in training for practicing physicians – isn’t acceptable. The addiction rate is too high in this country to ignore, or to avoid taking actions.

Not all of the new state mandates are good ideas.

The state of Washington passed a law in 2010 that took effect in July of this year. It says only pain management specialists can prescribe more than the equivalent of 120mg of morphine per day for a patient. Non-pain management doctors cannot prescribe more than this, by law.

I think it’s alarming when lawmakers set dose limits for any medication. I don’t know of any other medication in any other state that has a dose limit set by non-physicians.

I assume Washington’s lawmakers had good intentions. They’re concerned about the rising numbers of opioid overdose deaths in their state. They based the cut-off of 120mg of morphine on a study (Annals of Internal Medicine, Jan 19, 2010) that showed patients taking more than 100mg of morphine, or its equivalent, were nine times more likely to have a drug overdose than those prescribe 20mg or less. But these lawmakers aren’t equipped to understand the real life complications that may occur due to this law. Government officials have already admitted they don’t know how patients will be able afford to see pain specialists, or even be able to find a specialist, since there aren’t enough pain specialists in that state. The government’s website explaining the new rules (3) also admits there are no lists of physicians pain specialists. I couldn’t find the state’s definition of a “pain specialist” on this website, so there will be confusion as to what this even means. If it means only doctors who are board-certified in pain management, that will surely be a very small number. Some doctors have said they will avoid prescribing opioids at all, given the additional regulatory burdens.

Other critics of this new law say it gives false gives reassurances to patients and doctors that doses under the 120mg cutoff are safe. We know that’s not true. Many times the danger lies in other medications, like benzodiazepines, that are prescribed with opioids.

This same law goes into great detail about how pain patients are to be screened before opioids for chronic pain are started, and how patients who are prescribed opioids are to be managed. Patients must be screened for past addiction, and for depression and anxiety disorders. The law outlines how patients are to be followed by their doctors. Washington’s lawmakers also mandate random urine drug screening of patients being prescribed opioids, and written patient agreements. The law gets in to specific details about what needs to be in the patient monitoring agreement.

Some doctors feel the government has overstepped its bounds and will interfere with physicians’ clinical judgments. Patients are already complaining that they have great difficulty finding doctors who will prescribe opioids to adequately treat their pain.

I support most legislation that helps physicians identify and treat opioid addiction, but I think Washington’s law has gone too far. Balanced, rational decisions are urgently needed. If we over-react out of fear, the pendulum will swing too far to the other side. Over-regulation could have unintended consequences including having patient in acute or pain or with cancer pain unable to get an adequate prescription for opioids.

1. 1. Missed Opportunity: A National Survey of Primary Care Physicians and Patients on Substance Abuse, Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, April 2000. Also available online at http://www.casacolumbia.org  
2.  Under the Rug: Substance Abuse and the Mature Woman, Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, 1998. Available online at http://www.casacolumbia.org
3.  http://www.doh.wa.gov/hsqa/Professions/PainManagement/

More about Prescription Monitoring Programs

In October, Florida’s prescription monitoring program finally became functional. This means doctors in Florida (finally) can go to this database to see if their patients are being prescribed controlled substances by other doctors. The program isn’t mandatory. Physicians don’t have to use the system if they don’t want to do so. But in my opinion, if a doctor is prescribing controlled substances to a patient, particularly in Florida, it would be sloppy medical practice NOT to use this program. Doctors who are truly interested in indentifying doctor-shopping drug seekers will use this database.

Florida’s prescription monitoring program has been a long time coming. If you read this blog frequently, you’ll remember I was highly critical of Florida’s Governor Scott’s initial reluctance to allow a prescription drug monitoring program. His reluctance mystified me, given the tremendous numbers of pain pills being prescribed and dispensed in Florida. The pain pills prescribed and dispensed by Florida’s pill mills didn’t stay in Florida. They were exported north to states like Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia. This occurred so commonly that it became known as the “Flamingo Express.”

At present, only a few states are still dragging their feet about getting an operational program. As of now, only Missouri and the District of Columbia don’t have prescription monitoring programs, and have no plans to start one. (It seems odd that D.C., where lawmakers started the push for prescription monitoring programs, doesn’t already have a functioning program.)

In recent news reports, Florida’s Governor Scott said he felt the new laws that prevent physicians from both prescribing and dispensing pain pills are an important part of reducing Florida’s pain pill problem. Prior to these new laws, physicians were able to both prescribe and dispense opioid pain pills. This created a financial incentive for unprincipled doctors to prescribe opioids, since they then sold these opioids to their patient for more than the average pharmacy price. This practice was common in Florida’s pill mills. In 2010, Florida physicians bought 89% of all the oxycodone sold to U.S. medical practitioners.

In these recent news reports, around 80 doctors have had their licenses suspended due to their prescribing habits. These doctors often prescribed large amounts of opioids without demonstrating a clear need and without taking precautions to assure the “patients” they saw weren’t abusing the drugs.

 I believe this has already led to a relative scarcity of pain pills available on the black market in our state of North Carolina, and a subsequent increase in price. For the last month, the opioid treatment program where I work has seen a sharp increase in the numbers of addicts entering treatment. These patients say the same thing when I ask why they decided to seek help now: they’re spending too much money on pills, to the point of financial ruin, and pills are more difficult to find. One addict said, “I can’t find pills like I could. And when I do, I can’t afford them anyway.” Recently, addicts report spending more per milligram for illicit prescription opioids like oxycodone, morphine, and hydrocodone.

I don’t care whether it’s Florida’s new prescription monitoring program or their crackdown on unscrupulous doctors that’s causing fewer pills for sale on the black market in our area. I’m just thankful that it’s happening.

Readers of this blog, do any of you have opinions as to the availablility of black market prescription opioid drugs now, compared to several months ago?