CTN-0138: adaptation, implementation, and cluster randomized trial of a Community Pharmacy-Based Prescription Drug Monitoring Program Opioid Risk Assessment Tool—a protocol paper

Abstract

Background As the opioid epidemic continues to have a major negative impact across the US, community pharmacies have come under scrutiny from legal systems attempting to hold them accountable for their role in over dispensing and lack of patient intervention. While the most available tool for monitoring patients’ opioid use is Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMP), these do not provide pharmacists with actionable information and decision support. Our study addresses this gap through three objectives: [1] incorporate validated opioid risk metric thresholds into a PDMP platform to create the Opioid Risk Reduction Clinical Decision Support (ORRCDS) tool; [2] assess ORRCDS’ ability to reduce patient opioid risk; [3] assess ORRCDS’ sustainability and viability for broader dissemination in community pharmacy. Methods For objective 1, our team is partnering with leadership from the largest US PDMP organization and a top-five pharmacy chain to implement ORRCDS into the pharmacy chain’s workflow following the Guideline Implementation with Decision Support (GUIDES) framework. For objective 2, our team will conduct a type-1 implementation mixed methods study using a 2-arm parallel group clustered randomized design. We anticipate enrolling ~ 6,600 patients with moderate and high opioid use risk during the 6-month enrollment phase across 80 pharmacies. This sample size will provide 96.3% power to detect a 5% or greater difference in responder rate between the intervention and control arm. Responders are patients with moderate-risk at baseline who reduce to low-risk or those with high-risk at baseline who reduce to moderate or low-risk at 180 days post last intervention. To accomplish objective 3, we will use the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR) to develop and execute cross-sectional qualitative interviews with pharmacists (n = 15), pharmacy leaders (n = 15), and PDMP leaders (n = 15) regarding long term adoption and sustainability of the ORRCDS tool. Conclusions A PDMP tool that addresses moderate- and high-risk opioid use is not available in community pharmacy. This study will implement ORRCDS in a large retail pharmacy chain that will include additional screening and guidance to pharmacy staff to address risky opioid medication use. Our results will make critical advancements for protecting patient health and addressing the opioid epidemic.