OIG Toolkit to Identify Patients at Risk of Opioid Misuse

In the July 2017 data brief, Opioids in Medicare Part D: Concerns About Extreme Use and Questionable Prescribing (OEI-02-17-00250), OIG found that a half-million Medicare Part D beneficiaries received high amounts of opioids in 2016 and that nearly 90,000 of these beneficiaries were at serious risk of opioid misuse or overdose. As a follow up to the data brief, OIG plans to release a toolkit to assist public and private stakeholders in addressing the opioid epidemic. The toolkit will provide information on how OIG analyzed a large dataset of opioid claims to produce patient-level opioid data, as well as how it calculated Morphine Equivalent Dose (MED) levels for these patients.

Announced or Revised	Agency	Title	Component	Report Number(s)	Expected Issue Date (FY)
Completed	Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services	OIG Toolkit to Identify Patients at Risk of Opioid Misuse	Office of Evaluation and Inspections	OEI-02-17-00560	2018