Postoperative emergency department visits for pain after outpatient orthopaedic surgery: did rescheduling hydrocodone make a difference?

Background: In 2014, the United States Drug Enforcement Agency rescheduled hydrocodone from schedule III to II to mitigate the opiate crisis in America. Hydrocodone has long served as common pain medication after outpatient orthopaedic surgical procedures in the United States. We hypothesize rescheduling of hydrocodone would correlate with an increase in postoperative emergency department visits for pain. Methods: We performed a retrospective review of all outpatient orthopaedic procedures and identified all patients who subsequently presented to our emergency department for postoperative pain for the one calendar year prior to and after the rescheduling of hydrocodone. Results: We identified 2984 orthopaedic procedures and 3193 emergency department visits for postoperative pain across all surgical specialties. 875 orthopaedic procedures occurred prior to hydrocodone rescheduling with 48 postoperative ED visits for pain (5.4%). 2109 procedures occurred after the rescheduling of hydrocodone with 123 ED visits for pain postoperatively (5.8%). 199 patients presented to the ED for postoperative pain, for a total of 345 visits. The median postoperative time to emergency room visit for the pre-rescheduling group was 6.5 days versus 4.0 days post-rescheduling. Conclusions: We identified statistically significant differences in postoperative medication and prescribed amounts. We identified no difference in the proportion of patients that went to the emergency room by timeframe relative to hydrocodone rescheduling, nor did we identify a difference between samples in terms of gender, race, insurance status, and comorbid conditions. Increased restriction on hydrocodone prescribing did not increase emergency department visits for pain after outpatient orthopaedic surgery. Level of Evidence: Therapeutic III.