Decreased Post-Surgical Opioid Prescribing Does Not Affect Provider Satisfaction Scores
*Christopher E Louie, *Julia L Kelly, Richard J Barth, Jr
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Lebanon, NH
Objective: To determine if decreased opioid prescribing is associated with a decrease in provider satisfaction scores.
Design: Retrospective analysis of opioid prescribing and routine patient survey results.
Setting: Academic medical center.
Patients: Eleven surgeons performed 5 common outpatient general surgical operations on 996 total patients in Timeframe A (5/1/15 - 12/31/15) and Timeframe B (7/1/16 – 6/30/17).
Interventions: N/A.
Main Outcome Measures: 1. Opioid prescriptions 2. Patient reported “overall satisfaction rating” of provider (scale 1-10), collected by a routine general institutional survey of approximately 15% of all outpatient encounters.
Results: Comparing timeframe A to B, the percentage of patients prescribed opioids decreased from 90.2% to 72.8% (p < 0.0001) and the mean number of opioid pills per prescription decreased from 28.3 to 13.3 (p< 0.0001). The mean number of opioid pills prescribed significantly decreased for each of the 11 surgeons.
One hundred five of these 996 patients responded to the survey. There was no difference in the mean provider satisfaction ratings from timeframe A (9.70) vs B (9.65).
Across the two timeframes there were 640 total surveys collected referencing these 11 providers (including outpatient encounters associated with operations other than the 5 index cases). There was no difference in the mean satisfaction ratings from timeframe A (9.55) and B (9.59). One provider had a slightly higher and one a slightly lower satisfaction score in timeframe B vs A; there was no difference in the scores of the other 9 individual providers.
Conclusions: Despite a marked decrease in the percentage of patients receiving opioids, and a greater than 50% reduction in the number of pills per prescription, there was no significant change in provider satisfaction ratings.
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