ArticleHealth services & outcomes research methodology2021
Methodological Challenges and Proposed Solutions for Evaluating Opioid Policy Effectiveness.
Article in Health services & outcomes research methodology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Punitive legal responses to prenatal drug use in the United States: A survey of state policies and systematic review of their public health impacts.The International journal on drug policy · 2024Pooled it
- Criterion validity and divergent risk profiles of long-term opioid therapy across medicare and medicaid.PloS one · 2026Article
- Choosing an analytic approach: key study design considerations in state policy evaluation.Health services & outcomes research methodology · 2026Article
- States' Use of Medicaid Waivers for Children with Behavioral Health Needs is Associated with Lower Rates of Voluntary Child Welfare Placements.Child & adolescent social work journal : C & A · 2025Article
- Prenatal drug use criminalization and health system avoidance: Evidence from births in Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee, 1989-2019.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2025Article
- Advancing equitable and sustainable urban health.Nature medicine · 2025Review
- Creating a Classification System of Opioid Use Disorder Treatment Policies: A Research Protocol.Substance use & addiction journal · 2025Article
- Improving Policy Evaluations Of The Opioid Crisis.Health affairs (Project Hope) · 2025Article
- Examining opioid agonist treatment (OAT) site operations and early signals of change in the first year of British Columbia's drug decriminalization policy: Insights from a provincial survey.Canadian journal of public health = Revue canadienne de sante publique · 2025Article
- How do restrictions on opioid prescribing, harm reduction, and treatment coverage policies relate to opioid overdose deaths in the United States in 2013-2020? An application of a new state opioid policy scale.The International journal on drug policy · 2025Article
- The association of state policies and opioid analgesic amount dispensed from retail pharmacies.Drug and alcohol dependence · 2025Article
- A Longitudinal Multivariable Analysis: State Policies and Opioid Dispensing in Medicare Beneficiaries Undergoing Surgery.Journal of general internal medicine · 2024Article
- High-Dose Opioid Prescribing in Individuals with Acute Pain: Assessing the Effects of US State Opioid Policies.Journal of general internal medicine · 2024Article
- Drug-related physician continuing medical education requirements, 2010-2020.Journal of substance use and addiction treatment · 2024Article
- Scaling Interventions to Manage Chronic Disease: Innovative Methods at the Intersection of Health Policy Research and Implementation Science.Prevention science : the official journal of the Society for Prevention Research · 2024Article
- Why higher copayments for opioids did not reduce use among Medicare beneficiaries.Health economics · 2024Article
- Association of Selected State Policies and Requirements for Buprenorphine Treatment With Per Capita Months of Treatment.JAMA health forum · 2023Article
- An integrated abundance model for estimating county-level prevalence of opioid misuse in Ohio.Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A, (Statistics in Society) · 2023Article
- A Bayesian Spatio-temporal Model to Optimize Allocation of Buprenorphine in North Carolina.Statistics and public policy (Philadelphia, Pa.) · 2023Article
- A modified Delphi process to identify experts' perceptions of the most beneficial and harmful laws to reduce opioid-related harm.The International journal on drug policy · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Opioid-related mortality increased by nearly 400% between 2000 and 2018. In response, federal, state, and local governments have enacted a heterogeneous collection of opioid-related policies in an effort to reverse the opioid crisis, producing a policy landscape that is both complex and dynamic. Correspondingly, there has been a rise in opioid-policy related evaluation studies, as policymakers and other stakeholders seek to understand which policies are most effective. In this paper, we provide an overview of methodological challenges facing opioid policy researchers when evaluating the effects of opioid policies using observational data, as well as some potential solutions to those challenges. In particular, we discuss the following key challenges: (1) Obtaining high-quality opioid policy data; (2) Appropriately operationalizing and specifying opioid policies; (3) Obtaining high-quality opioid outcome data; (4) Addressing confounding due to systematic differences between policy and non-policy states; (5) Identifying heterogeneous policy effects across states, population subgroups, and time; (6) Disentangling effects of concurrent policies; and (7) Overcoming limited statistical power to detect policy effects afforded by commonly-used methods. We discuss each of these challenges and propose some ways forward to address them. Increasing the methodological rigor of opioid evaluation studies is imperative to identifying and implementing opioid policies that are most effective at reducing opioid-related harms.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.