Nurse Practitioners and Behavioral Health Medications Prescriptions
Here was the question studied and then published recently here:
Question How was the COVID-19 pandemic associated with trends in medication treatment initiation across various behavioral health conditions in the US?
And here is your answer:
The largest unadjusted percentage increase in incident prescriptions by prescriber specialty was among nurse practitioners across all drug classes ranging from 7% (from 1 811 376 to 1 944 852; benzodiazepines) to 78% (from 157 578 to 280 925; buprenorphine MOUD), whereas for patient age and sex, the largest increases were within C-II stimulants and nonstimulant ADHD drugs among patients aged 20 to 39 years (30% [from 1 887 017 to 2 455 706] and 81% [from 255 053 to 461 017], respectively) and female patients (25% [from 2 352 095 to 2 942 604] and 59% [from 395 678 to 630 678], respectively).
Nurse practitioners had the largest increases in prescribing incident prescriptions across the 5 drug classes. This is consistent with a study that found that behavioral health visits among Medicare beneficiaries conducted by psychiatric behavioral health nurse practitioners increased by 162%, whereas those by psychiatrists decreased by 6% from 2011 to 2019
What do you think about this? For the authors: “Our study, based on incident prescription data, suggests an increasing contribution of nurse practitioners initiating medication treatment of behavioral health conditions compared with other health care practitioners.”
Could this have been from online Rx scams like Cerebral? Is it just more and more NPs doing psyche?
