Influence of opioid prescribing standards on health outcomes among patients with long-term opioid use: a longitudinal cohort study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia introduced opioid prescribing standards and guidelines in mid-2016 in British Columbia. We evaluated impacts of the standards and guidelines on health outcomes. Methods: We conducted a longitudinal study with repeated measures using administrative data from December 2013 to March 2017. The study included BC patients with long-term use of prescription opioids. Those with a history of long-term care, palliative care or cancer were excluded. Patients were followed for a 12-month prepolicy period and 10-month postpolicy period and compared with historical controls. We estimated changes in level (sudden changes) and monthly trend (gradual changes) of rates of opioid overdose hospital admission, and secondary outcomes of all-cause hospital admission, all-cause emergency department visits, opioid overdose mortality and all-cause mortality. Results: The study included 68 113 patients in the main cohort and 68 429 historical controls. We did not find significant changes to opioid overdose hospital admissions in level (adjusted rate ratio [RR] 0.83, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.45–1.54) or in trend (adjusted RR 1.00, 95% CI 0.91–1.10). All-cause hospital admissions declined in level but may have increased in trend, suggesting that a temporary decrease in hospital admissions may have occurred. We found no significant changes in all-cause emergency department visits, opioid overdose mortality or all-cause mortality. Interpretation: Among patients with a history of long-term prescription opioid use, the regulatory prescribing standards and guidelines were not associated with changes in opioid overdose hospital admissions, all-cause emergency department visits, opioid overdose mortality or all-cause mortality, or with a sustained reduction in all-cause hospital admissions, over a 10-month period after they were introduced. Future research should investigate whether opioid prescribing standards or guidelines are associated with use of nonopioid analgesic medications or nonpharmacologic treatments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".