Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT: Introduction
The opioid epidemic is a modern public health emergency. Common interventions to alleviate the opioid epidemic aim to discourage excessive prescription of opioids. However, these methods often take place over large municipal areas (state-level) and may fail to address the diversity that exists within each opioid case (individual-level). An intervention to combat the opioid epidemic that takes place at the individual-level would be preferable.Methods
This research leverages computational tools and methods to characterize the opioid epidemic at the individual-level using the electronic health record data from a large, academic medical center. To better understand the characteristics of patients with opioid use disorder (OUD) we leveraged a self-controlled analysis to compare the healthcare encounters before and after an individual's first overdose event recorded within the data. We further contrast these patients with matched, non-OUD controls to demonstrate the unique qualities of the OUD cohort.Results
Our research confirms that the rate of opioid overdoses in our hospital significantly increased between 2006 and 2015 (P?pain or malignancy, which may suggest that overdose stems from pharmaceutical opioids prescribed for these conditions.Conclusions
Informatics-based methodologies, like those presented here, may play a role in better understanding those individuals who suffer from opioid dependency and overdose, and may lead to future research and interventions that could successfully prevent morbidity and mortality associated with this epidemic.
SUBMITTER: Averitt AJ
PROVIDER: S-EPMC7309230 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Apr
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Averitt Amelia J AJ Slovis Benjamin H BH Tariq Abdul A AA Vawdrey David K DK Perotte Adler J AJ
JAMIA open 20191126 1
<h4>Introduction</h4>The opioid epidemic is a modern public health emergency. Common interventions to alleviate the opioid epidemic aim to discourage excessive prescription of opioids. However, these methods often take place over large municipal areas (<i>state-level)</i> and may fail to address the diversity that exists within each opioid case (<i>individual-level</i>). An intervention to combat the opioid epidemic that takes place at the individual-level would be preferable.<h4>Methods</h4>Thi ...[more]