The Military Health System has shown a significant decline in prescriptions for opioids as a primary tool for pain management.
The decline in prescriptions for opioid medications - like morphine and oxycodone - highlights the success of the Defense Health Agency's training and education programs aimed at reducing the risks linked to opioid medications.
The most dramatic decline in recent years was reported among active-duty service members, but military health data shows reductions in opioid prescriptions across the entire Military Health System including among non-active-duty beneficiaries under age 65 and non-active-duty beneficiaries 65 and over.
Opioids have been prescribed as a pain reducer for many years, but the medical community has grown increasingly concerned about their risk of addiction and potentially fatal overdoses. To reduce those risks, the MHS has mounted a force-wide effort to curtail the prescribing of opioids in favor of other effective pain management techniques.
"The MHS, like all civilian medicine organizations across the nation, has been working hard to raise awareness of the specific risks associated with opioid medications. The data indicate that our providers have integrated this into their prescribing practices," said Kevin Galloway with the Defense and Veterans Center for Integrative Pain Management, the DOD's center of excellence for pain management located at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland.
Declines across the system
Among active-duty service members during the period from April 2017 to July 2021, military health data shows a 69% decline in prescriptions filled for opioids at a strength of 50 morphine milligram equivalents (MME) per day or more.
For beneficiaries who are not on active duty and are under the age of 65, the decline for the same period was 47%. And for non-active-duty beneficiaries 65 or older, the decline was 32%, according to data from the MHS Information Platform maintained by the Program Executive Office, Defense Healthcare Management Systems.
The MHS is also reporting fewer opioids prescribed to people in another risk category - those who are co-prescribed opioids and benzodiazepines, such as Valium or Xanax. The combination of those two types of medications can be dangerous and increase the risk of an overdose.
MHS beneficiaries who are on long-term opioid therapy - defined as taking opioids 90 days or more out of the past 180 days, also has declined.
The declines are good news, but should be seen in the context of a larger effort across the MHS to improve the quality of pain management.