Academic detailing increases prescription drug monitoring program use among primary care practices

BACKGROUND: Clinical review of a Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) is considered a valuable tool for opioid prescribing risk mitigation; however, PDMP utilization is often low, even in states with mandatory registration and use policies. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the impact of an Academic Detailing (AD) outreach intervention on PDMP use among primary care prescribers. METHODS: AD intervention was delivered to primary care based controlled substance prescribers (n=87) and their associated PDMP delegates (n=42) by a clinical pharmacist as one component of a large-scale, statewide initiative to improve opioid prescribing safety. Prescriber PDMP use behavior was assessed by prescriber self-report and analysis of objective 2016 – 2018 PDMP data regarding number of monthly report requests. We compared means between pre and post intervention using a paired t-test and plotted the monthly average reports over time to assess trend of mean reports over time. Generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) with a Negative Binomial distribution was used to assess the difference in the trend and magnitude of the combined count of reports for the entire sample and prescriber subsets that were segmented based on adoption status of PDMP. RESULTS: The monthly mean of reports by combined prescribers and delegates significantly increased following the AD intervention (mean 28.1 pre vs. 53.0 post; p