In recent years, prescription medications to treat alcohol use disorders have become increasingly available and have proven to be effective treatments. However, research has found that these medications are greatly underused, with typically fewer than 10% of people with the disorder getting treatment. Is the underuse because physicians aren’t prescribing these medications, or because patients are not filling prescriptions? To answer that question, researchers at Heller conducted a study to identify factors related to prescription order and fill, using a national dataset that included 14,674 adults aged 18 or older seen in outpatient settings who had previously been diagnosed with alcohol use disorder.
The study, “Medications for Alcohol Use Disorder: Rates and Predictors of Prescription Order and Fill in Outpatient Settings,” was recently published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. In the paper, Dominic Hodgkin, professor at Heller, Connie Horgan, director of the Institute for Behavioral Health and co-director of the Schneider Institutes for Health Policy and Research at Heller, and their co-authors detailed results that indicate a low rate of physician prescription of these medications, resulting in a low rate of prescription fill. Previous research has indicated that physicians may be more likely to prescribe medications to patients they believe are open to taking them, or who specifically request the treatment.
“We saw the significance of clinician-patient relationships when it comes to prescribing these medications,” said Hodgkin, who also served as principal investigator. “This study has the potential to influence policy interventions that will encourage clinicians to prescribe these medications and support their patients in taking them to treat this life-threatening disorder.”
Co-authors on the paper included researchers from Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University and the RAND Corporation.
Read the full paper in Journal of General Internal Medicine.