Sanae El Ibrahimi (Environmental and Occupational Health) and colleagues from Comagine Health, the Center for Policy and Research in Emergency Medicine at the Oregon Health & Science University and Pharmacy College at the Oregon State University recently published "A Comparison of Trends in Opioid Dispensing Patterns between Medicaid Pharmacy Claims and Prescription Drug Monitoring Program Data" in the Journal of Pharmacoepidemiology & Drug Safety. The study funded by grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute on Drug Abuse assessed the effect of restricitve high-risk opioid prescriptions policies on the increase of out-of-pocket payments. The study compared discrepancies in trends between opioid prescription fills and pharmacy claims for 495,355 Medicaid beneficiaries using data from the Oregon prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP) and Oregon Medicaid administrative claims and found higher rates of opioid prescription fills in the PDMP data than in Medicaid claims data. This suggests more Medicaid beneficiaries may be paying out-of-pocket for these fills.
