The OSI is a computer system that tracks veterans’ prescriptions and provides physicians with additional information on safer prescribing practices.
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After conducting an analysis of prescribing habits across VA hospitals, researchers found high-dose opioid prescriptions decreased by 16 percent and prescriptions written for very high-dose opioids decreased by 24 percent since the implementation of the OSI. Researchers also found the frequency of prescriptions including both opioids and sedatives, which can be a deadly combination, declined by 21 percent.
“I’ve been doing research around opioids for a few years,” Lewei Lin, MD, the study’s first author and an addiction fellow in the University of Michigan’s psychiatry department in Ann Arbor, told The Michigan Daily. “As an addiction clinician, I see a lot of the negative consequences. Anything that gives us some insight about the next steps that we can do to try to reduce some of the negative consequences, I think is really exciting and promising.”
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