Mississippi: Dental Opioid Epicenter of 2014
<p>The <a href="http://www.ada.org/en/advocacy/advocacy-issues/prescription-opioid-abuse" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">American Dental Association</a> has called for its members to help fight against the opioid epidemic. While dentists are prescribing a small percentage of opioids, overall, in the U.S., they are a main prescriber for <a href="http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/896134" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">patients between the ages of 10 & 19</a>. For each of 127,338 dentists, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) public <a href="https://data.cms.gov/Medicare-Claims/Medicare-Part-D-Opioid-Prescriber-Summary-File-201/e4ka-3ncx/data" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">dataset</a> includes the percentage of their written prescriptions that were opioids.</p>
<p>The median opioid prescription rate (% of all prescriptions they wrote that were for opioids) across dentists whose prescriptions were covered by Medicare Part D in 2014 was <strong>16.8%</strong>. These dentists gave out a total of <strong>1,110,725</strong> opioid prescriptions, or <strong>1.4%</strong> of all opioid prescriptions covered by Medicare Part D in 2014.</p>
<p><a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/mississippi-dental-opioid-epicenter-of-2014-ab4d7f68fa49"><strong>Read More</strong></a></p>