CareSource: Member Opioid Use Down 40% In 18 Months

CareSource, Ohio’s largest Medicaid plan, recently reported a 40% decrease in opioid use among its members over the past 18 months. The organization—which privately manages 1.8 million Medicaid plans—anticipates that this percentage will rise to 50% by the end of 2018.

In 2016, CareSource launched a program that notified clinical professionals whenever they were prescribing high amounts of opioids to members—a move that came in response to national data that found Medicaid members were more than twice as likely as non-Medicaid members to receive opioid prescriptions. Further, by utilizing claims data—number of pills . . .