New research from the University of Houston and the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston found monitoring pain patients through urine drug screenings ensures patient safety, but reduces the odds the patients will return for treatment.
The study is timely, given President Barack Obama's call earlier this year to set aside $1.1 billion in federal funds to combat drug abuse, including improving treatment for people addicted to opioids.
To examine a correlation between drug screening and patients' attendance to follow-up appointments, the researchers looked at the electronic medical records of more than 4,400 clinic encounters involving 723 patients between April 2009 and January 2012.
They found nearly one-quarter (23.75 percent) of chronic pain patients who were given a urine drug screening test failed to show up for their next appointment, as opposed to about 10 percent of patients who were not screened who missed their next appointment.
No-shows were particularly high among patients whose drug test came back positive, at 34.57 percent, but still prevalent among those whose screening tests were negative, at 21.74 percent.
"This raises concerns that the (screenings) administered early in the doctor-patient relationship might have an inadvertent impact on injuring patient expectations of trust," wrote the study authors.
Ultimately, the researchers did not recommend ceasing or delaying drug screenings, but they did highlight the importance of understanding how drug screenings may have some unintended consequences that mitigate their benefit.
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