Hefei Wen
Emory University, GA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Rules meant to make opioid prescribing safer can help some patients and harm others, and which happens depends on details of how the rules are implemented. One group bears an outsized share of the risk: Medicare beneficiaries under 65, who qualify through disability and make up roughly 3% of the U.S.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Social Science
- Topics
opioid safety policy
Medicare Part D
prescription opioids
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Estimate effects of the first year of Medicare Part D opioid safety edits, before the 2020 public health emergency, on non-elderly beneficiaries prescribed long-term, high-dose opioid therapy, using 2017-22 Medicare claims and quasi-experimental designs.
- Measure appropriate versus inappropriate opioid tapering, buprenorphine initiation for opioid use disorder, and opioid-related emergency department and inpatient events as the intended, unintended, spillover and downstream effects of the policy.
- Compare how key subgroups of high-risk, non-elderly beneficiaries were differentially affected, testing whether some were less likely to benefit from the safety edits and more susceptible to abrupt dose reduction or discontinuation.
- Extend the analysis across pre- and post-public health emergency periods to assess how the Part D safety policy interacted with temporary federal flexibilities in Medicare telehealth and opioid prescribing regulations.
More about the research
population but account for about a quarter of overdose deaths and hospitalizations tied to prescription opioids. Within this group, harms concentrate among the 20-25% receiving long-term opioid therapy, mostly for chronic pain. This project evaluates what a major federal safety policy actually did to these patients.
Why it matters
Non-elderly Medicare beneficiaries on long-term, high-dose opioid therapy face high rates of overdose and hospitalization, and blunt safety rules can push prescribers into abrupt tapering that endangers them. Evidence on who benefited and who was harmed by the Part D safety edits, and on how pandemic-era telehealth flexibilities changed those effects, could help federal policymakers and health plans design prescribing safeguards that protect patients with chronic pain rather than cutting off their care.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jennifer Waljee
Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, IN·Public Health & Epidemiology
Measure how state opioid prescribing limits affect opioid prescribing and adverse events after surgery, and how effects vary by policy feature, patient, procedure and prescriber, using commercial, Medicare and Medicaid claims with quasi-experimental methods.
Zachary Mannes
Columbia University, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Test whether cannabis use disorder is a risk factor for later opioid use disorder, opioid-related hospitalization, and fatal or non-fatal overdose. Use a longitudinal cohort built from VHA electronic health records.
Steffani Bailey
Oregon Health & Science University, OR·Public Health & Epidemiology
Examine rates of opioid use disorder care — diagnosis, buprenorphine and other medication orders, retention on medication, and behavioral health visits — before, during, and after telehealth expansion, using nearly a decade of OCHIN electronic health record data from community health centers in 35 states.
The school
Emory University: 70 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 286 research doctorates a year.
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