Trinity Health and Pacira Pharmaceuticals Announce Collaboration to Decrease Opioid Use

Trinity Health, one of the largest hospital systems in the nation, and Pacira Pharmaceuticals announced they will collaborate to develop an alternative approach to opioids for pain management.

This collaboration intends to demonstrate the way health care systems and the pharmaceutical industry can work together to improve patient care and address a serious global problem that affects the health of individuals as well as communities.

In collaboration, Trinity Health and Pacira will work to improve the overall patient-recovery experience and decrease the threat of long-term opioid risks which include misuse, abuse, and addiction. In doing so, they will also improve the economics of acute care and create new procedure-specific enhanced recovery and pain protocols that, when appropriate, will include using less risky pharmaceutical alternatives to opioids. Together, the organizations will also develop both physician- and patient-facing educational materials and generate quality improvement data that tracks their successes and progress reducing the use of opioids for pain management. This data will also guide next steps in developing and testing other protocols and products.

"The health care industry must strive to eliminate painkiller addiction and its often tragic endings," said Paul Conlon, Pharm.D, J.D., and senior vice president of Clinical Quality and Patient Safety for Trinity Health. "We are pleased to be working with Pacira to develop a more people-centered approach for pain management across the many diverse communities we serve."

Under the terms of the collaborative agreement, Trinity Health and Pacira teams will identify patient populations who would most benefit from opioid minimization strategies in hospitals. They will then develop protocols and training for procedure-specific enhanced recovery. Each approach will aim to reduce or replace opioids that are commonly used to manage postsurgical pain. 

"We are excited and proud to collaborate with Trinity Health on this joint commitment to reducing reliance on opioids as the first line of defense for managing acute pain," said Dave Stack, chairman and chief executive officer of Pacira. "By working collectively to develop, disseminate, and educate on these enhanced recovery protocols, and thus reducing exposure to debilitating and costly opioid-related adverse events or longer-term societal burden, we are truly advancing patient care."

Beyond the unwanted and potentially life-threatening adverse events associated with opioid use, research continues to uncover the connection between their introduction in the hospital setting and the overall societal opioid burden.

A recent JAMA Internal Medicine article highlighted that for opioid-naive patients, many surgical procedures are associated with an increased risk of chronic opioid use in the postsurgical period; perhaps more startling, a recent national survey revealed that 1 in 10 patients admit they’ve become addicted to or dependent on opioids after being exposed to these powerful medications following an operation.

Adding further validity to the importance and impact of these collaborative opioid-sparing protocols is the element of patient preference. A 2014 study uncovered that more than half of postsurgical patients prefer a non-opioid option, and a national survey conducted in 2016 found many patients have indicated they are delaying surgery due to fear of taking opioids to manage their pain.

According to a 2016 analysis of health care claims, opioids also significantly contribute to health care system costs. The study showed that the national aggregated dollar value of charges related to opioid-related diagnoses increased more than 1,000 percent from 2011 ($32.4 million) to 2015 ($445.7 million), and private payers’ average costs for patients abusing or dependent on opioids was almost $16,000 more per patient than the average cost per patient across all patients’ claims.

Additionally, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently shared their findings on the high societal cost of the opioid epidemic, which burdens the U.S. economy with an estimated total of $78.5 billion a year.