Chatbots delivering psychotherapy help decrease opioid use after surgery

"We showed that opioid medication utilization could be decreased by more than a third in an at-risk patient population by delivering psychotherapy via a chatbot," said the study's lead author, Christopher Anthony, MD, the associate director of Hip Preservation at Penn Medicine and an assistant professor of Orthopaedic Surgery. "While it must be tested with future investigations, we believe our findings are likely transferrable to other patient populations." Although opioids can be appropriate to treat the pain that results from an injury like a broken leg or arm, there is a concern that a large prescription of opioids might be an on-ramp to dependence for many. The researchers -- who included Edward Octavio Rojas, MD, a resident in Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics -- believe a low-effort, patient-centered approach to reducing the number of opioids taken can be a valuable method for cutting into the opioid epidemic. To test this approach, 76 patients who went to a Level 1 Trauma Center at the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics for fractures that required a surgery to fix were randomly divided into two groups.