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Most electronic medical record systems provide default prescriptions for medications such as opioids. To test whether the default pill quantity influences the number of pills actually prescribed, researchers altered the prepopulated dispense quantities for opioid prescriptions at two emergency departments (EDs) in California. Every 4 weeks for 20 weeks each ED was randomly assigned a default prescription quantity of 5, 10, 15, or none specified. Prescribing at the baseline default quantities — 12 pills at one ED, 20 at the other — was assessed for 8 weeks before and after the intervention. The decision to prescribe opioids was left to ED clinicians, who were free to change the prescribed quantity.
The analysis included 4320 opioid prescripti…