Prior authorization and opioid abuse
An interesting article by Cochran et al. (2017) examines whether health plan prior authorization rules can help prevent opioid abuse. The authors use Pennsylvania Medicaid data from 2010 to 2012. The data included both fee-for-service and managed care enrollees. The authors measured opioid abuse based on diagnosis codes for opioid use disorder (304.0, 304.00, 304.01,…