Patterns of opioid overprescribing following arthroplasty likely developed given that poor pain control can diminish patient satisfaction, delay disposition, and lead to complications. Recently, interventions promoting responsible pain management have been described however most of the existing literature focuses on opioid naive patients. We sought to describe the effect of an educational intervention on prescribing for opioid tolerant patients. As the start to a quality improvement initiative to reduce opioid overprescribing, a departmental grand rounds was conducted. Prescribing data, for the year before and after this intervention, were retrospectively collected for all opioid tolerant patients undergoing primary total knee arthroplasty (TKA) and primary total hip arthroplasty (THA). Opioid prescribing data was standardized to mean morphine equivalents (MME). Segmented time series regression was utilized to estimate the change in opioid prescribing associated with the intervention.Background
Methods
