While costs and other challenges are likely to remain a concern, specialty drugs continue to be researched for these and other conditions and may provide relief that traditional therapies cannot, which could potentially result in better quality of life as well as fewer hospital admissions, emergency room visits and laboratory tests. Credit: Bigstock While costs and other challenges are likely to remain a concern, specialty drugs continue to be researched for these and other conditions and may provide relief that traditional therapies cannot, which could potentially result in better quality of life as well as fewer hospital admissions, emergency room visits and laboratory tests. Credit: Bigstock

In workers' comp pharmacy management, opioids often get the lion's share of attention, and for good reason. As a nation, we're still challenged to ensure safe and effective application of prescriptions amid an opioid epidemic. But numbers are moving in the right direction. While opioids continue to be the most-utilized therapeutic class among our injured workers in 2022, there were declines in both utilization (7.7%) and cost (14.7%) per claim, and there's been a steady decline for the past eight years in the morphine equivalent dose (MED) prescribed to patients.

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Workers' Comp