Opioids Situation Improves, But Workers’ Comp Pharmacy Faces New Challenges

Nikki Wilson, Pharm.D./MBA, Senior Director of Clinical Pharmacy Services at Enlyte. Courtesy photo

In workers’ comp pharmacy management, opioids often get the lion’s share of attention, and for good reason. As a nation, we’re still challenged to ensure evidence-based safe and effective application of prescriptions amid an opioid epidemic. But numbers are moving in the right direction. While opioids continue to be the most-utilized therapeutic class among our injured workers in 2022, there were declines in both utilization (7.7%) and cost (14.7%) per claim, and there’s been a steady decline for the past eight years in the morphine equivalent dose (MED) prescribed to patients.

While we still need to pay close attention to opioids to keep improving the situation, opioids are far from the only challenge that workers’ comp pharmacy faces. Topicals, for example, now rank as the top spend among therapeutic classes, and they’re being prescribed in workers’ comp with greater frequency. In 2022, topicals accounted for 18.5% of total drug cost and 7.2% of total prescriptions.