Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

All 50 U.S. states now have enacted prescription drug monitoring programs (PMPs) to provide eligible professionals with patients’ controlled prescription information to combat the opioid crisis. This paper studies the complementarity of health information technology (IT) and restricted patient information in drug monitoring programs on reducing opioid-related mortality and morbidity. I construct a novel data set that records state health IT policies that facilitate PMP data interoperability, including cross-system integration and interstate data sharing. Therefore, physicians can improve analysis for adverse drug interactions and identify patients who shop for amenable physicians across states. Utilizing difference-in-difference and event study methods, I find that health IT levers in addition to drug monitoring reduce opioid-induced mortality and morbidity. The impact is most salient in the emergency setting and among patients between ages 25 and 44, and the estimates are robust across subsamples stratified by gender, income, and payer. I also analyze the interaction between health IT policies and PMP user mandates. The health IT-induced impacts are significant regardless of mandate status, while I find little impact of the mandate itself. A back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that the total benefits from improved interoperability exceed the costs of adopting health IT levers. I argue that health policies should be integrated with technology policies to expand the impact of both.

Keywords: opioid crisis, prescription drug monitoring, health IT interoperability, technology policy

JEL Classification: I1 (Health), K2 (Regulation and Business Law), O3 (Innovation • Research and Development • Technological Change • Intellectual Property Rights)