Statewide collaborative examines opioid-free discharge after kidney cancer surgery

In this video, Katherine Wang, MD, discusses the background behind the Urology Practice study “Practice-Level Variation in Opioid-Free Discharge Following Surgery for T1 Renal Masses: A MUSIC-KIDNEY Analysis.” Wang is a research fellow in the department of urology at Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, Michigan.

Transcription:

Please describe the background for this study.

In the [p]ast 10 to 20 years, there's [been] an ongoing opioid epidemic. I'm sure you know about it, as a lot of people do. And unfortunately, physicians are actually one of the contributing factors, especially with surgical subspecialties. After surgery, we tend to prescribe patients some opioids after discharge just to deal with pain and try to mitigate that. But unfortunately, there are no set prescribing patterns. And we tend to over-prescribe opioids. And so we decided to look at this in Michigan through our collaborative called MUSIC, the Michigan Urological Surgery Improvement Collaborative, which is a quality improvement collaborative here just to see if there were any implications with opioid-free discharge, whether that's safe or feasible for kidney cancer surgery. Our collaborative MUSIC has a branch called MUSIC-KIDNEY, which collects data on T1 renal masses, which is kidney cancer masses smaller than 7 cm. In 2021, we started collecting data on opioids prescribed at discharge to see whether or not patients did or did not get prescribed opioids. And so in this setting, we evaluated the safety and feasibility of opioid-free discharge after kidney cancer surgery.

This transcription was edited for clarity.