Medical Xpress: Default setting in EM records ‘nudged’ emergency department physicians to limit opioid prescriptions to 10 tablets

“The research team found that physicians from two Penn Medicine emergency departments prescribed a fewer number of opioid pills to their patients when the EMR default setting was set to 10 tablets. ‘Our results represent a promising and much-needed scalable approach that could successfully nudge physicians managing acute pain to prescribe smaller doses of opioid medications for those who need them,’ said lead author M. Kit Delgado, MD, MS, an assistant professor of Emergency Medicine and Epidemiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. ‘We know that prescribing too many opioid tablets for acute pain increases a patient’s risk for long-term use or the potential to be abused if left in the medicine cabinet, so making it easier to prescribe quantities consistent with current guidelines while still keeping physician autonomy is an important part of addressing the opioid crisis we’re facing in this country.'” Read the rest of the article here.