Reuters (2/6, Rapaport) reports a study published in The BMJ suggests that “the top 1% of opioid prescribers in the U.S. are responsible for 49% of all opioid doses and 27% of all prescriptions.” Researchers “examined data on 8.9 million opioid prescriptions for 3.9 million patients from 2003 to 2017, based on records from an average of 669,495 providers each year,” and found that “by 2017, the top 1% of providers prescribed a yearly average of 748,000 ‘morphine-milligram equivalents’ (MMEs), a standardized way of describing doses of different types of opioids,” which “was roughly 1,000 times more than the providers in the middle percentiles.”
Related Links:
— “Just a few hundred prescribers responsible for half of U.S. opioid doses, “Lisa Rapaport, Reuters, February 6, 2020