There are problems with the number of opioid prescriptions in Tennessee, according to a report Tennessee Comptrollers released this week.
The website for the Tennessee Comptroller’s Office of Research Education Accountability, which published the report, was apparently down Thursday night.
But a Comptroller’s press release described the findings.
The report examines the opioid prescribing patterns of Tennessee’s doctors, nurses, dentists, and other licensed practitioners. Comptroller researchers worked to identify prescribers whose patterns were “significantly statistically abnormal,” and to investigate what disciplinary responses, if any, were taken by the licensing boards in response.
“The Comptroller’s Office of Research and Education Accountability (OREA) identified 62 prescribers for further investigation based on their 2017 prescribing patterns. It is important to note that identification by OREA for further investigation alone did not indicate inappropriate prescribing. Prescribing data can be used as a tool to find potentially inappropriate prescribing, but a fuller range of information is necessary to determine if an identified prescribing pattern is inappropriate,” according to a press release from the Comptroller’s office.
“Forty-nine of the 62 prescribers identified by OREA (79 percent) have not been disciplined by their licensing board since the start of 2017 and are not currently under investigation by the department. Eight of the 62 prescribers identified by OREA received some level of discipline since the start of 2017, and the department is developing cases against the remaining five prescribers.”
Among the report’s key conclusions:
• For half (31 of the 62) of prescribers identified by OREA, no query had been opened by the Department of Health. This suggests that an area of potential improvement for the department is the monitoring of specific types of prescribing patterns, such as monitoring prescribers with a high number of patients on concurrent opioid and benzodiazepine prescriptions.
• Consultants play a significant role in determining the ultimate course of the Department of Health’s investigations into prescribers. Consultants decide whether the department will begin an investigation and, after an investigation, whether discipline will be sought against a prescriber and the level of discipline that will be pursued. Of the 62 prescribers identified by OREA, queries opened by the department were closed for 16 prescribers based on a consultant’s opinion, while six prescribers reached a settlement with the department based on the disciplinary recommendations of a consultant.
• From opening a query to receiving a ruling from a board, the disciplinary process can take years to complete. For example, four of the five prescribers whose cases are currently being developed by the department have been under investigation for at least two years and have not yet been brought before the relevant board.
The report includes three policy considerations that address the Department of Health’s use of data to identify potentially inappropriate prescribers and the role of consultants in determining whether to seek discipline against practitioners with potentially inappropriate prescribing patterns.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
You want to see if YOUR community is part of the Opiod PROBLEMS ! Just watch the doctors parking lot.. You will see out of county license plates, cars filled with people, and they will be celebrating with one another while calling others to share the good news.. that they have scored a new prescription. There is many including the Tennessee state comptroller that should be held accountable for the loss of a generation of citizens from drug deaths. Prepare for your judgement !
Of course, we have an opioid crisis, but I hope they take into consideration – if some of these physicians are surgeons they have a lot of patients recovering from surgery and these people need effective pain killers; they should not suffer. Seems like the current regulations of how much can be prescribed at one time should work. If that had been in place in the beginning, would we even HAVe an opiod crisis.?