Researchers analyzed data from a national private insurer covering Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. They studied 669,495 providers prescribing 8.9 million opioid prescriptions from 2003 through 2017.
They found top 1 percent of opioid prescribers — that is, the physicians with the highest rate of opioid prescriptions — accounted for 27 percent of all opioid prescriptions.
The top 1 percent of opioid prescribers prescribed an average of 748,000 opioid doses, nearly 1,000 times more than the middle 1 percent of prescribers.
In contrast, prescriptions written by the bottom 99 percent of opioid prescribers were within recommended thresholds.
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