By Ross Balding

Is there a link between high opioid prescription rates and mortality? Does an increase in opioid prescriptions worsen a community’s overall health expectancy? What role do health care providers play in the ever-worsening opioid crisis in the country?

University of Rhode Island College of Pharmacy Professors Ashley Buchanan and Jeffrey Bratberg aim to answer those questions and more after receiving a $76,000 grant to develop methods to analyze opioid prescription rates and health outcomes of patients prescribed opioids, taking into account social influence.

The grant was awarded by the Advance Clinical and Translational Research (Advance-CTR) program as a part of its Pilot Projects initiative. The URI project involves analyzing administrative claims databases to define a network of patients around their provider, and then determining opioid prescription rates within those provider-based networks. The administrative claims data comes from Rhode Island Medicaid and Optum.

The main goal is to determine whether the rate of opioid prescriptions in different provider based networks affects the health outcomes of patients in that network. Besides opioid prescription rates, the study will analyze rates and effects of medication assisted therapy with other drugs associated with opioid dependence and overdoses, such as buprenorphine and naloxone.

“Dr. Bratberg and I will be determining the rates of opioid prescriptions within those provider based networks to improve prescribing practices,” said Buchanan. “Ultimately, we’re looking at whether or not there is a spillover effect, meaning that patients being prescribed opioids in networks with high rates of opioid utilizations would have worse health outcomes than patients in provider networks with lower rates of opioid prescription.”

Most of the grant money was used to purchase socioeconomic data to accompany the administrative claims data. The information is important to determining whether there’s causality between opioid prescription rates and health outcomes; it helps researchers control for socioeconomic factors like poverty affecting a community’s health outcomes.  

Buchanan has worked on similar research projects before, including her work with HIV prevention among populations of people who are dependent on drugs, another study that takes into account social as well as biological influence, using administrative claims and electronic health records. Graduate student Tianyu Sun and recent alumna Hilary Aroke are assisting with the project.

Ross Balding is a senior journalism student and intern with the Academic Health Collaborative.