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Science Quickly

Docs Given Updated Opioid Prescribing Habit

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.31.4K Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2020

⏱️ 3 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Researchers dialed down the default number of opioids in two hospitals’ prescription systems—and doctors ended up prescribing fewer pills. Christopher Intagliata reports.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Little things, like taking a shortcut through the park on your way to work each day can make a big difference

0:16.0

to your mental health. Find your little big thing

0:27.0

little big thing at every mind matters.

0:38.0

This is scientific American's 60 Second Science. I'm Christopher in Tagayata. Used to be. When doctors prescribed a drug, they'd open up a book summarizing drugs and

0:43.9

dosages or go by memory for the common stuff but nowadays now you can type in

0:49.1

whatever it is and then it's placing an order via the computer so you type in an order of the name of the

0:55.0

drug and it will pre-populate everything. Juan Carlos Montoy is an emergency

1:00.2

medicine physician at San Francisco General Hospital, he also studies

1:03.8

decision-making in health care. He says for an antibiotic the default dose

1:08.0

programmed into a doctor's computer might be pretty standard, but for pain the

1:12.4

number of opioids prescribed might vary a lot

1:14.9

depending on the patient and their type of pain.

1:17.2

What we wanted to look at is weather and to what extent the presets, the default settings that we had in the electronic

1:24.2

medical record influence provider prescribing. Specifically, would lower

1:29.2

defaults result in fewer opioids being prescribed.

1:33.0

So Montoy's team systematically changed the recommended opioid pill number defaults in the computer

1:38.0

systems of two hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area during an eight-month period.

1:43.2

Each hospital's pre-existing defaults were 12 and 20 pills respectively.

1:47.8

The researchers dialed in new defaults of 5, 10, 15, or an unspecified number of pills.

1:54.6

Compared to doctors prior prescribing habits,

1:56.7

the new default settings resulted in fewer opioid pills

1:59.8

prescribed overall, and fewer prescriptions exceeding the maximum recommendations

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