As one more tactic in the opioid epidemic battle, West Virginia’s Board of Pharmacy is developing a system that will produce “prescriber report cards,” according to the Charleston Gazette-Mail.
The pharmacy board’s system will allow it to rank doctors by specialty based on the number of prescriptions they write for pain medications, the newspaper says.
The report cards won’t be available to the public and the results aren’t intended to be used for disciplinary reasons, only to educate doctors about their prescribing habits. Doctors will be able to see their own numerical ranking, but not a complete list of rankings.
“We’re going to categorize prescribers, and then send notifications of how they rank among their peers with their prescribing practices,” Michael Goff, a pharmacy board administrator, told the newspaper.
Doctors will be compared based on their prescription numbers within specialty, such as orthopedic surgery or pediatrics.
Trying to curb widespread opioid abuse that claimed nearly 20,000 U.S. lives last year alone, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came out with new opioid prescription guidelines in March. The guidelines advise primary care clinicians to prescribe treatments other than opioids for chronic pain outside of active cancer treatment, palliative care and end-of-life care.
While the guidelines apply to outpatient settings, a recent study found that opioids remain a common prescription for patients at discharge from the hospital, despite concerns that such prescriptions also introduce a risk for dependency.
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