SP09-73: Effect of the Pennsylvania Prescription Drug Monitoring Program on Opioid Dispensing in a Medicaid Population

Poster Presenter

Rushabh Lagdiwala

Student
University of the Sciences, Philadelphia College of Pharmacy
United States

Objectives

This research project was designed to analyze the impact of the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) on prescribing trends in the Pennsylvania (PA) Medicaid population by looking at the prescription data in before (2015-2016) and after (2017-2018) the PDMP was implemented.

Method

PA specific PDMP data on the number of prescriptions & units reimbursed quarterly for opioids was obtained from Medicaid.gov. Units per prescription & difference in data before & after implementation of the PDMP was analyzed using a two-tailed t-test for unequal variances, with p values set at 0.05.

Results

The there was a decrease of over 78 million units reimbursed for CII medications after the introduction of the PDMP (2015-2016 compared to 2017-2018). Class III-V medications showed a decrease of over 5 million fewer units reimbursed. There were 1,251,542 fewer CII prescriptions written but 183,423 more CIII-CV prescriptions in the two-year interval after the PDMP. When the units-per-prescription was analyzed, the data showed a decrease from 66.59 (SD=1.34) units-per-prescription to 61.98 (SD=2.07) units-per-prescription (p < 0.001). Similarly, CII-CV average units per prescription decreased from 58.09 (SD=4.31) to 51.54 (SD=4.94) units per prescription (p=0.13).

Conclusion

There is a statistically significant decrease in the prescribing of opioids prior to & after the implementation of the PDMP in PA. Further, the data show a decrease in the units of all opioid controlled medications per prescription written. Based on the results of this study, there seems to be an impact of the PDMP on opioid prescribing behavior.