Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs - Essay Example

Most medical professionals believe that prescription drug abuse is a getaway activity to hard drugs. As such, prescription drug monitoring programs (PMDP) are practical assets used to battle physician-endorsed medication to check for abuse and overdose. The PDMPs are consistently increasing throughout many nations as their impact gets more ingrained in the medical profession. Presently, the United States of America leads by example, as it has 49 states with PDMPs (Lyden & Binswanger, 2019). However, not all States have initiated the program. The State of Missouri does not have a prescription drug monitoring program, while St. Louis County runs a different PDMP from the rest of the States (Lily, 2017). As such, the purpose of this research is to investigate the impact of PDMP programs on the rate of prescription drug addiction among people living in the United States of America.

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Background of the Problem

Lily (2017) stated that the State of New York initiated the first PDMP program in 1918. The plan was used by practitioners to screen solutions for hard drugs such as opium, codeine, morphine, heroin, and cocaine. The program required medical personnel to report any diagnosis related to the stated conditions within 24 hours. However, the significance of this activity was not felt by other states for twenty more years, up until the time California saw the importance of such a program and began its own in 1939 (Lyden & Binswanger, 2019). From this time till 1989, PDMPs were majorly paper-based activities until the State of Oklahoma initiated electronic storage and transfer. The CDC Injury Center reported that the PDMPs are the most active state-level intervention measures to monitor prescription drugs in clinical practice ("PDMPs …,” 2020). The program has also generated remarkable results as witnessed through the reduction of States’ admission of substance abuse patients as well as considerable changes in doctors’ and patients’ prescribing behaviors.

Research Question

This research will focus on the impact of prescription drug monitoring programs on increasing or decreasing prescription drug addiction rates. To achieve this objective, the researcher will be investigating the factors that contribute to high or low rates of prescription drugs in the United States of America, as well as the potential impact of PDMPs towards mitigating the same. The research question and hypothesis, therefore, are;

RQ: What is the effect of prescription drug monitoring programs on the rate of prescription drug addiction?

Hypothesis: PDMPs have a positive impact on the rate of prescription drug addiction?

Literature Review

In an assessment of narcotic maltreatment uncovered through Medicare prescription examples, Buchmueller and Carey (2016) stated that decreases in abuse-related cases within States significantly improved through PDMPs. Also, States that require specialists to consult the database when giving prescriptions reported improved control over the rate of prescription drug addicts (Buchmueller & Carey, 2016). The researchers assessed those projects with the most- restricting prerequisites for doctors and afterward assessed those projects that are less rigid in the prescriber. Also, the practitioners desire to figure out which program structures are generally elective in decreasing narcotic abuse, and overdose demise is of vital importance in reducing the rate of prescription drug addiction (Weissman et al., 2017). The research identified with PDMP projects is still developing.

Research Methodology

This research proposes to use a systematic review to answer the research question. The researcher will collect empirical evidence presented by previous researchers and analyze their findings concerning the impact of prescription drug monitoring programs on the rate of prescription drug addicts. By proposing to pitch PDMP (independent variable) against the rate of prescription drug addicts (dependent variable), the researcher intends to reach a conclusive judgment about the effectiveness of the PDMP to curb abuse of prescription medicine. The research findings will also inform how to reduce the number of Prescription drug addicts at the national level.

The researcher will use desk research by evaluating publications submitted to PubMed for a period of 10 years, starting from 2009 to 2019. The study also seeks to utilize a population size of 100 research papers, (n=100), and synthesize through the articles to get the most significant research on the research topic. Other than a direct inquiry to the publishers of selected research items, the research will categorize the findings of the investigations using a Likert Scale approach that will give quantitative value to the publication's relevance to the present study.

For data validity and verification, the present research will evaluate data sets from ten selected research articles on PDMP. The research variables will be analyzed using correlation coefficient analysis. After that, the researcher will determine how strongly the findings relate to the present research question, and by so doing, identify the interrelation between PDMP and addiction to prescription medicine. The researcher will then extrapolate research findings to reflect on the overall outcome of the prescription drug monitoring programs on the rate of prescription drug addiction at the state level.

References

Buchmueller, T. C., & Carey, C. (2018). The effect of prescription drug monitoring programs on opioid utilization in Medicare. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 10(1), 77-112. 10.1257/pol.20160094

Lyden, J., & Binswanger, I. A. (2019, April). The United States opioid epidemic. In Seminars in perinatology (Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 123-131). WB Saunders. https://doi.org/10.1053/j.semperi.2019.01.001

Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs) | Drug Overdose | CDC Injury Center. Cdc.gov. (2020). Retrieved 25 June 2020, from https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/pdmp/states.html.

Weissman, J., Kanamori, M., Dévieux, J. G., Trepka, M. J., & De La Rosa, M. (2017). HIV risk reduction interventions among substance-abusing reproductive-age women: A systematic review. AIDS Education and Prevention, 29(2), 121-140. https://doi.org/10.1521/aeap.2017.29.2.121