Mathew Kiang (.com)Yes, with one "t".

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Our new paper about opioid prescribing patterns in the US

Two stacked panels, Doses on top and Prescriptions below, each plotting the cumulative proportion accounted for, 0 to 1.0, against the top centile of prescribers, 0 to 100. A solid purple line is opioids and a dashed yellow line benzodiazepines, with annotated values at the 1st, 5th, 10th and 50th centiles. For doses the curves rise almost vertically: opioids reach 0.49 at the top 1 percent of prescribers, 0.78 at the top 5, 0.88 at the top 10 and 0.99 at the top 50, with benzodiazepines slightly lower throughout. For prescriptions the curves are less extreme and nearly identical to each other, reaching 0.27 at the top 1 percent, 0.53 at 5, 0.67 at 10 and 0.95 at 50.

Some notes about a new (open access) paper with Keith Humphreys, Mark Cullen, and Sanjay Basu — “Opioid prescribing patterns among medical providers in the United States, 2003-17: retrospective, observational study” — just published in BMJ.

  • Reproducible code is available on the official paper Github repository. I don’t plan to make any changes, but just in case, the first release is the version of the code used to produce the manuscript.
  • We’ve created a handful of Shiny apps for interested readers. What we present in the paper is only a tiny sliver of all the results — additional results by drug, sensitivity analyses, outcome, and geography are available through the apps.
  • Despite our best efforts, we were not able to share the aggregated (proprietary) data. However, we’ve created a mechanism for other researchers to access the data through Stanford’s Center for Population Health Science’s Data Core. (Approval from an Optum representative is still required — see the Github repo for details.)
  • In addition, we’ve created a mechanism for researchers to get access to the raw data for a fee to reproduce our entire analysis from start to finish.
  • As with most BMJ papers, the peer review reports are open and publicly accessible.