California’s State Compensation Insurance Fund (SCIF) announced that they’ve reduced the number of opioid prescriptions for injured workers by 60 percent, and they’ve reduced spending on prescription opioids by 74 percent since their opioid-reduction program was launched in 2014.

According to The San Francisco Chronicle, the fund decreased prescriptions from 140,300 to 56,200 and decreased spending from $21.7 million to $5.6 million between 2014 and 2017. Spending on opioids as a proportion of overall spending on prescription drugs went from 25 percent to 17 percent.

SCIF’s initiatives to reduce opioid prevalence included early prevention in new comp cases, as well as a reduction of chronic opioid uses in existing cases. The plan was implemented by SCIF’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Dinesh Govindarao and his team. They also utilized a peer-to-peer physician review program, a functional restoration program for workers who were taking chronic and high levels of opioids, and educated workers and their treating physicians.

“Peer-to-peer education of prescribing physicians has been instrumental in the success of State Fund’s opioid-reduction program,” said Dr. Govindarao. “Not all providers have adequate training on pain management and opioid prescribing, and many patients don’t understand the impacts of their medications, which is why education about appropriate and alternative treatments, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, has been a key focus area for our program.”

They saw the number of injured workers taking high doses of opioids decrease from 1,458 to 186 in the past four years. In the future the fund hopes to reduce opioid use even further by expanding their chronic pain program to reach more workers, updating their online physician training modules for treating acute and chronic pain, and adopting the Division of Workers’ Compensation guidelines limiting initial opioid prescriptions to four days.

Read more from SCIF.