Government-Academic Partnerships in Randomized Evaluations: The Case of Inappropriate Prescribing

摘要

There is growing evidence that inappropriate prescribing—prescribing that conflicts with clinical guidelines or violates fraud and abuse laws—is harming the health of patients and driving costly health-care utilization. The near-quintupling of prescription opioid pain reliever overdose deaths since 1999 is a stark example of this phenomenon; health-care utilization related to opioid use disorder has increased in lockstep, and the literature finds overprescribing and associated utilization in many other classes of drugs as well (see Paulozzi et al. 2011; Mack et al. 2015; Fleming-Dutra et al. 2016; and citations in Sacarny et al. 2016). On this topic, like many others, the interests of academic researchers, policymakers, and practitioners overlap. For researchers, there is uncertainty about the underlying drivers of overprescribing; in turn, for policy, the most effective approaches to stop overprescribing remain unclear. The opportunity and need for collaboration are significant.