Per-capita Opioid Prescription to Medicare Part-D Patients in the United States.

Test of Tabloid Public software.

I am still testing software with the capability to map data geographically. This page may change as I manipulate the page layout.

Below is a map of the number of opioid prescriptions written for Medicare Part-D beneficiaries in 2013 divided by the total general population of each state. This version of “per-capita” adjustment corrects somewhat for the large differences in the population amount the states. I have shown earlier that prescriptions of opioids to Medicare patients correlates well with opioid prescription to the general public. It is disappointing to see Kentucky and our neighboring states stand out as hot-spots of prescription opioid drug use. Hover your cursor over the map to interact with the actual data. Here is a link to a full size version.

Peter Hasselbacher, MD
President, KHPI

Norton Healthcare and University of Louisville Settled Their Dispute Over Children’s Hospital

Breaking News!

Andy Wolfson of the Courier journal is reporting that Norton and UofL have settled their dispute over Kosair Children’s Hospital.  We are all waiting to learn the terms of the settlement related to this important community asset.

Peter Hasselbacher

 

Website Theme Change for KHPI.

I have been using the same basic theme for this WordPress-based website for several years. It was not very friendly to the mobile devices that many of our readers use.  For that and other technical and aesthetic reasons, I upgraded the theme-in-use to “Twenty Sixteen,” WordPress’s new default theme released recently with an update of the underlying software. Among other changes, you  will find that the sidebar materials collapse to the bottom on smaller screens making it easier to use the site on phones and pads.

There are new technical resources available to me that I will have to learn. You may notice some other smaller changes as I tweak the site’s banner-image and add additional widgets to make the site more useful.  Do any of the more technical of you out there have any other suggestions?  Is there anything that is not working?

Thanks for your patience!
Peter

Mapping Part-D Medicare Opioid Prescriptions in Kentucky By County and Zip Code

In a technical test-posting last week, I reworked the dataset used by Medicare to show where prescriptions of opioids to Part-D Medicare patients were written in Kentucky in 2013 by five-digit Zip Code.  I reworked the data to add the average number of opioid prescriptions written by an opioid prescriber in that zip code. This supplements Medicare’s own calculation of the percent of all prescriptions that are for opioids in a given area. Both these indices provide insight into the intensity of opioid prescribing in a given area.  In today’s posting, I add a map of the same data broken down by Kentucky county.  Not surprisingly, significant geographic variation exists in both maps that is compatible both with public perception of places where prescription drug abuse is prevalent, and locations where individual prescriber outliers practice. This particular dataset is based on the principal business address of the prescriber, but I have shown that prescribing of opioids to Medicare patients correlates strongly with prescribing to all patients, and that not unexpectedly, the location of the prescriber predicts were the patients live. Descriptions of the underlying data and caveats for its use are discussed in earlier articles.

Mapping by county:
Below is a map of opioid prescribing to Medicare patients by county. The maps are fully interactive. The viewer can use the legend to switch from one measured index to another, or to zoom in on various areas. Clicking on a shaded area displays the underlying data for that county.

View a larger version of CMS Opioids KY Counties 2013 created with eSpatial mapping software.

Continue reading “Mapping Part-D Medicare Opioid Prescriptions in Kentucky By County and Zip Code”