How Can Managed Care Pharmacists Help Combat the Opioid Epidemic?

Gavras: They have a very strong and active role in this. We have actually done a lot of work with this at Prime Therapeutics. We have worked with some of our plans, where we have looked for the folks that are on a significantly high number—an outlier number—of narcotic medications. Then, what we have done is contact the prescribing physicians directly and talked to them about their members. This has helped with polypharmacy, it has helped with indications.

We have published a poster about this recently at AMCP. What it showed is that we were able to reduce the overall prescription amount by about 1 prescription per year and also a significant amount of savings for our client health plans.