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Abstract
Background: In the United States, the opioid crisis has been considered a major public health concern. In 2015, approximately 11.5 million U.S. citizens reported misusing prescription opioids. The purpose of this evaluation is to compare the pain management practices in an academic medical center with the current guidelines, focusing on prescription opioids in geriatric patients. Methods: Three months medication orders in 2018 were used, targeting prescription opioid analgesics/opioid analgesic combinations. Patients included were geriatric patients over 65 years. Results: AGS guidelines recommend acetaminophen as the drug of choice for musculoskeletal pain. Our analysis showed that patients who had musculoskeletal disease pain were the highest users of opioid prescriptions. Our results showed that tramadol had the highest number of PRN prescriptions. AGS recommend that patients taking opioids should be reassessed for safe medication use; however, tramadol had the highest number of refills with 62 individual prescription up to 5 refills.