ArticleJournal of the American College of Emergency Physicians open2025
The Effect of Federal Policy Changes on Buprenorphine Prescribing in Massachusetts.
Article in Journal of the American College of Emergency Physicians open, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
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Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Objectives: Two federal policy changes were recently implemented to expand access to buprenorphine. Our objective was to determine whether these policies were associated with a change in the trend of buprenorphine prescribing in Massachusetts, specifically among specialists including emergency physicians (EPs). Methods: The Massachusetts Prescription Drug Monitoring Program database was searched for buprenorphine prescription records between May 2020 and January 2024. Monthly counts of buprenorphine prescriptions were measured for 12-month pretime and posttime periods for each policy. Monthly prescriptions were stratified by specialties of interest, and interrupted time series analyses evaluated the impact. Results: There was no change in the total buprenorphine prescriptions per month (bppm) between the prepractice-guideline period compared with the postpractice-guideline period nor between the pre-no-X-waiver period compared with the post-no-X-waiver period in Massachusetts. Among EPs, there was no change in prepractice guideline (-9.9 bppm, 95% CI, -33.4 to 13.7) and a declining trend in the postpractice-guideline of 15.6 (95% CI, -27.9 to -3.4) fewer bppm. Among EPs, there was a declining trend of 17.8 (95% CI, -26.9 to -8.6) fewer bppm in the pre-no-X-waiver period, which flattened (5.7 bppm, 95% CI, -18.7 to 7.3) in the post-no-X-waiver period. Conclusion: The analysis demonstrates that the 2 federal policy changes were not associated with a significant change in the trend of total buprenorphine prescriptions written monthly in Massachusetts. The magnitude of decline in monthly buprenorphine prescriptions among ED physicians may have been tempered by the elimination of the X-waiver.
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.