Machine learning nonresponse adjustment of patient-reported opioid consumption data to enable consumption-informed postoperative opioid prescribing guidelines

Background Post-discharge opioid consumption is a crucial patient-reported outcome informing opioid prescribing guidelines, but its collection is resource-intensive and vulnerable to inaccuracy due to nonresponse bias. Methods We developed a post-discharge text message-to-web survey system for efficient collection of patient-reported pain outcomes. We prospectively recruited surgical patients at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts from March 2019 through October 2020, sending an SMS link to a secure web survey to quantify opioids consumed after discharge from hospitalization. Patient factors extracted from the electronic health record were tested for nonresponse bias and observable confounding. Following targeted learning-based nonresponse adjustment, procedure-specific opioid consumption quantiles (medians and 75th percentiles) were estimated and compared to a previous telephone-based reference survey. Results 6553 patients were included. Opioid consumption was measured in 44% of patients (2868), including 21% (1342) through survey response. Characteristics associated with inability to measure opioid consumption included age, tobacco use, and prescribed opioid dose. Among the 10 most common procedures, median consumption was only 36% of the median prescription size; 64% of prescribed opioids were not consumed. Among those procedures, nonresponse adjustment corrected the median opioid consumption by an average of 37% (IQR: 7, 65%) compared to unadjusted estimates, and corrected the 75th percentile by an average of 5% (IQR: 0, 12%). This brought median estimates for 5/10 procedures closer to telephone survey-based consumption estimates, and 75th percentile estimates for 2/10 procedures closer to telephone survey-based estimates. Conclusions SMS-recruited online surveying can generate reliable opioid consumption estimates after nonresponse adjustment using patient factors recorded in the electronic health record, protecting patients from the risk of inaccurate prescription guidelines.