Suzanne McDermott, PhD, University of South Carolina (Funded 2018)
The overall goal for this project is to describe the opioid prescription filling experience for people with a range of disabilities, and to characterize their use of inpatient hospital and Emergency Department (ED) services during a two-year period. Publicly available National Health Interview Study (NHIS) data will be linked to the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), for the period 2010-2016. We expect to have 6 panels, including the 2015 panel that is due for release in September 2018, and will identify two case groups after excluding all adults with a cancer diagnosis, and those who are less than 18 or over 64 years of age. The first case group will be those with physical disabilities, and the second case group will be adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). The comparison group will be adults without physical disabilities or IDD. There will be two sets of analyses: the first will identify the risk factors for opioid use among the two case groups and the comparison group. The second will focus on the opioid users in each group to characterize the quantity of opioid prescriptions, using the Morphine Equivalent (MME) conversion factor, to predict hospital inpatient and emergency department use, during the 2-year windows provided for each MEPS panel.