Florida's prescription drug monitoring programs and its requirement for "pill mills" to abide by strict oversight from the state have proved to be successful at limiting opioid abuse. Researchers performed various analyses on IMS Health LifeLink LRX data from July 2010 through September 2012 and examined data from Florida and Georgia as a control, according to Pain Medicine News.
Here are five observations:
1. Researchers found a decline in opioid volume of 2.5 kg per month. This volume is equivalent to 500,000 5 mg tablets of hydrocodone bitartrate per month.
2. To obtain the results, researchers applied comparative interrupted time-series analyses to the data to characterize the effect of PDMPS and the pill mill law implementation of a closed cohort of prescribers, patients and retail pharmacies. Researchers also performed sensitive analyses to validate their findings.
3. Of the 2.6 million observed patients, 431,980 prescribers and 2,829 pharmacies were linked with nearly 480 million prescriptions in Florida and Georgia during the study period. Of these prescriptions, 7.7 percent were for opioids.
4. The findings indicate the total values for all of the outcomes measured were greater in Florida than in Georgia before Florida's strict pain prescription laws were implemented. Twelve months after the laws were implemented, researchers found a 1.4 percent decrease in opioid prescriptions, 2.5 percent decrease in opioid volume and 5.6 percent decease in MME per transaction.
5. The decrease in opioid use may be partly attributed to the pill mill law. Every state except Missouri has a PDMP, but pill mill laws are less common. Head researcher, Lainine Rutkow, JD, PhD, said, "What's interesting is, we were looking at these laws in combination in Florida. The findings suggest that, since nearly every state has a PDMP, they may want to think about enacting pill mill laws."
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