Assessment of doctor-shopping for high dosage buprenorphine maintenance treatment in a French region: development of a new method for prescription database.

SUMMARY Purpose To assess the extent of doctor-shopping for buprenorphine maintenance therapy in a French region with a specificindicator.Methods Use of a quasi-exhaustive prescription database in a French region (information system of the French GeneralHealth Insurance Scheme). Extraction of all buprenorphine prescriptions between September 1999 and December 2000.Definition and calculation of three quantities for each patient: delivered, prescribed and doctor-shopping quantity. The cal-culation of these three quantities is done by an automated and reproducible method determining the overlaps in prescriptionperiods of different physicians for a given patient. Calculation of the corresponding daily dose was done for each quantity.Results A total of 64326 prescriptions of buprenorphine by 1313 physicians to 3259 patients were extracted. Quantitiesand doses were calculated for 2587 patients. The total doctor-shopping quantity represented 18.6% of the delivered quantity.Doctor-shopping involved a minority of patients and was highly concentrated: 87 patients with doctor-shopping doses super-ior to 16mg/day were responsible for 45.4% of the total doctor-shopping quantity.Conclusions Doctor-shopping appears to be an important problem for buprenorphine maintenance treatment in France butmay be resolved by regulatory interventions. The use of adequate indicators on prescription databases may help to limit theeffects of such interventions on legitimate care. The method presented here may be used with slight adaptations for othermedications to assess their abuse potential. Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.key words—doctor-shopping; prescription database; buprenorphine; maintenance treatment