Drop in opioid prescriptions in California more pronounced in comp: report

Declines in opioid use among injured workers exceeded the decline among the overall population from 2017 to 2023, the California Workers’ Compensation Institute reported Tuesday.

CWCI said data from the state’s Controlled Substance Utilization Review and Evaluation System, or CURES, shows that 17.3% of the state’s total population was receiving an opioid prescription in 2017 compared with 11.5% in 2023.

CWCI reported that the number of California residents receiving opioid prescriptions fell by 34% to 4.5 million in 2023 from 6.8 million in 2017. Over the same period, the number of work comp patients prescribed opioids fell 62% to 34,744 in 2023 from 91,620 in 2017.

Two-thirds of the decrease occurred in 2018, immediately after the Division of Workers’ Compensation incorporated the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine’s pain management and opioid treatment guidelines into the Medical Treatment Utilization Schedule and implemented the formulary.

However, the study documented “a concerning degree of overlapping utilization among workers compensation chronic opioid patients: That is, chronic workers compensation opioid patients were receiving prescriptions from other payer systems as well.”

The proportion of chronic work comp opioid users who also received opioids from one or more other payers decreased to 68.7% from 72.1% over the study period.

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