Prolonged Opioid Use Among Tricare Beneficiaries

Tricare, the insurance program for the Department of Defense, covers >9 million people, including active service members, retirees, and dependents. These authors queried Tricare's data repository from 2006 to 2014 to identify patients aged 18 to 64 years who initially were opioid-naive (no opiate prescriptions for at least 6 months) and subsequently received continuous opioid prescriptions for at least 6 months. Patients with a diagnosis of cancer were excluded.

More than 117,000 people met criteria for opioid dependence. The most common complaint codes associated with the initial opiate prescription included “other ill-defined conditions” and back, neck, musculoskeletal, and chronic pain. Only 800 patients with opioid dependence received th…