|Talks|

Professional Networks, Regulation, and the Cessation of High-Risk Prescribing in the Prescription Opioid Crisis

Visiting speaker
Hybrid
Past Talk
Victoria (Shu) Zhang
Assistant Professor, Wisconsin School of Business
Fri, Dec 8, 2023
5:30 PM UTC
Fri, Dec 8, 2023
5:30 PM UTC
In-person
4 Thomas More St
London E1W 1YW, UK
The Roux Institute
Room
100 Fore Street
Portland, ME 04101
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Network Science Institute
11th floor
177 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Room
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK

Talk recording

The United States has seen a precipitous rise in drug overdose deaths in the past two decades, fueled by physicians’ high-risk prescribing. To combat the opioid crisis, states introduced regulations that limit the initial supply of opioids prescribed. What drives physicians’ variation in response to the same regulation? I turn to social networks to investigate this puzzle. Drawing from a patient-sharing networks consisting of 269,542 physicians and 10.6 million initial opioid prescriptions, I find striking distinctions in the social networks supporting the cessation and persistence of high-risk prescribing. Physicians centrally embedded in the network (i.e. who have many connections) were particularly responsive to the regulation and curtailed their prescribing intensity. Importantly, this effect was only realized when the focal physician was out of step with their network. High-risk prescribing continued to persist among isolated physicians or in networks of high-risk prescribers. The results point to peer sanctioning concerns at play for driving the cessation of deviance. This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the joint effects of social networks and regulations in shaping the abandonment of contentious practices and informs network-based interventions to combat the prescription drug crisis.

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Dec 08, 2023