Assessing the Impact of Three Day Opioids Limits for Dentists

An interesting article titled “Opioid Formulary Edit’s Impact on Commercial Dental Prescribers” was presented on July 23, 2021, at the virtual session of the 2021 International Association for Dental Research (IADR)/AADR/CADR General Session written by David Hamlin and et al. The research set to investigate the impact the insurance company Cigna had when it implemented its three-day quantity limit on dental opioid prescriptions. Insurance companies limiting new opioid prescriptions for dentists to three days (or another time duration) has been discussed on this site before in the post Insurance Companies Limiting Access to Opioids After Wisdom Teeth Surgery. The authors speculated that by limiting opioid prescriptions to three day there would be year-over-year reductions in prescriptions greater than three days and reductions in the average total metric quantity per prescription. In the study, the authors looked at the claims of … Read more