Very few doctors in the United States are prescribing a drug that combats opioid addiction, a new study suggests.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the RAND Corporation analyzed prescriptions given out by physicians in 2017 and 2018, and found that half of all prescriptions for buprenorphine, used to treat chronic pain and opioid-use disorder, are written by only five percent of doctors.
What’s more, primary care physicians were more likely to prescribe the drug as opposed to pain or addiction specialists.
The team says the drug works and are calling on more doctors to develop strategies to increase buprenorphine’s usage, which will help combat the country’s severe opioid crisis.
Health experts say the drug isn’t being used for multiple reasons. Buprenorphine is an opioid itself and many fear it could cause a separate addiction, for example.
In addition, many physicians do not have a waiver to prescribe an addictive drug like buprenorphine, and a large proportion that are waivered to do so do not prescribe to the allowed capacity.
Researchers found that a few high volume prescribers are accounting for about half of all prescriptions of buprenorphine. They believe they can increase usage of the drug by focusing efforts on those physicians
For the study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers used prescription data from IQVIA, which accounts for around 90 percent of all prescription data in the country, from retail pharmacies for the two years.
They used three metrics to classify physicians: how many months they were actively prescribing the drug, the monthly amount of patients a physician had that they were actively prescribing the drug and the total months of care – which is the total amount of months the drug was prescribed across all patients, combined.
They also separated out the physicians by their type, such as primary care physicians (PCPs), advanced practice practitioners (APPs), pain specialists, psychiatrists, emergency physicians, addiction specialists and others.
PCPs, 43.8 percent of active prescription time, and APPs, 20.6 percent, prescribed the drug the most.
In general, it was found that prescriptions of the drug seemed to be carried by a certain few providers who prescribe it often, called high volume prescribers.
More than half of these high volume prescribers of buprenorphine were PCPs.
Researchers determined that these high volume of prescribers were recommending the drug to an average of around 124 patients each, and that five percent of high volume prescribers them were accounting for 50 percent of total usage of the drug.
To prescribe buprenorphine, doctors are required to undergo an eight-hour training course and receive a license, known as an ‘X-waiver.’
Many argue these regulations prevent thousands of doctors from being able to prescribe the drug to addiction patients.
The researchers say that not only waiving the course but increasing the capacity of patients it is prescribing to could lead to increased usage of the drug.
The maximum case load for each physician is 275, so only providing the drug to 124 patients each means there is still a lot of room for growth in the prescription of the drug.
‘These findings have important implications for efforts to increase buprenorphine access,’ said Dr Bradley Stein, the study’s lead author, in a statement.
‘Our study suggests that targeted efforts to encourage more current prescribers to become high-volume prescribers, and encourage existing high-volume subscribers to safely and effectively treat even more patients, may be a potent way to increase buprenorphine treatment capacity.’
Some disagree with the assessment from the study, though, arguing that buprenorphine is listed by the federal government as a controlled substance
A response published by the Journal of the American Medical Association said that increasing the usage of the drug may not quite be the noble goal the researchers believe it is.
‘Benzodiazepines have limited short-term efficacy, lack efficacy in longer-term use, and have undoubted potential for addiction, physical dependence, and severe long-term harms,’ said the respondent.
‘Like opioids, benzodiazepine use causes tolerance, dependence, and, in some, addiction, and may result in considerable discomfort during withdrawal.’
The response also pointed out that the drug is not to be used long term.
‘We believe the perils of [the drug] were downplayed,’ they said.