Dive Brief:
- To curb growing opioid use among Americans, a large group healthcare insurer is launching an alternative, and ambitious, pain management treatment strategy for members of its group plans, according to Fortune.
- Cigna, based in Philadelphia, is looking to cut potentially addictive opioid pain prescription drugs by 25% over the next three years among employees within its customer plan membership base.
- Using pain management strategies including prescriber/patient education, cognitive behavioral therapy, massage and chiropractic services, Cigna wants to roll the use of opioid-based pain meds such as Oxycontin, Percocet and other drugs back to the “pre-crisis” levels of 2006, Doug Nemecek, chief medical officer for Cigna’s behavioral health business, told Fortune.
Dive Insight:
Looking to rein in opioid-based drug use has long been a difficult challenge within the workers' compensation insurance industry, and now Cigna looks to apply that same thinking to the problem in the group health world.
Saying that the group insurance business "missed this,” Cigna's Nemecek told Fortune that over the past two decades, drug makers promoted the drugs among the prescriber community as not having that much of an addiction risk. That turned out not to be the case. Fortune points to government data showing that more than 165,000 Americans died from prescription painkiller overdoses between 1999 and 2014. And that doesn't include deaths from heroin overdoses, as people addicted to opioids often move to cheaper, easier to obtain heroin.
Along with using new CDC guidelines, Cigna's plan also includes a data-driven component, examining “how [Cigna] can share with physicians data on prescribing patterns so they have the most current information on what their patients are actually taking,” Nemecek told Fortune. Plan members who already have a substance use addiction will receive access to rehabilitation and treatment programs, Nemecek told Fortune.