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South Korea introduced a new health care IT system named the Narcotics Information Management System (NIMS) with the objective of managing all aspects of opioid use, including manufacturing, distribution, sales, disposal, etc.
The authors conducted an analysis using national claims data from 45,582 patients diagnosed with musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders between 2016 and 2020. The approach included using an interrupted time-series analysis and constructing segmented regression models. Within these models, the authors considered the primary intervention to be the implementation of NIMS, while we treated the COVID-19 outbreak as the secondary event.
To comprehensively assess inappropriate opioid use, we examined 4 key indicators, as established in previous studies:
(1) the proportion of patients on high-dose opioid treatment,
(2) the proportion of patients receiving opioid prescriptions from multiple providers,
(3) the overlap rate of opioid prescriptions per patient, and
(4) the naloxone use rate among opioid users.
This study suggests that, in its current form, the NIMS may not have brought significant improvements to the identified indicators of opioid overuse and misuse. Additionally, the COVID-19 outbreak exhibited no significant influence on opioid use patterns.
The absence of real-time monitoring feature within the NIMS could be a key contributing factor. Further exploration and enhancements are needed to maximize the NIMS’ impact on curbing inappropriate opioid use.
read the original at https://publichealth.jmir.org/2024/1/e47130/
Via nrip
