What Happens During Surgery May Reduce Opioid Use for Months

Pacira BioSciences recently presented a new study that looked at patients undergoing hip replacement surgery (specifically Medicare patients) and compared outcomes between those who received a non-opioid pain treatment called EXPAREL and those who received standard care.

EXPAREL is a long-acting local anesthetic given during surgery. Instead of affecting the entire body like opioids, it works directly at the surgical site, blocking pain signals where they originate.

It’s not eliminating opioids entirely, but it does reduce reliance on them.

Now, the goal was to measure opioid use, healthcare utilization, and total costs over time.

Here’s what they found …

Across every time frame measured, patients who received EXPAREL used fewer opioids.

At 30 days, 90 days, 6 months, and even a full year later, opioid consumption was consistently lower in the EXPAREL group, suggesting that what happens during surgery (specifically how pain is managed immediately) can have lasting effects on how much opioid medication a patient needs long after they leave the hospital.

Researchers also found that patients who received EXPAREL didn’t just use fewer opioids. They also used fewer healthcare resources overall.

That includes fewer hospital readmissions, fewer emergency room visits, and fewer outpatient visits.

Across multiple time points, these differences were statistically significant.

Put simply, patients who needed fewer opioids also tended to need less follow-up care.

Lower utilization also translated into lower cost.

On the day of surgery, costs were roughly the same between groups. But over time, differences began to emerge.

By the end of 1 year, patients who received EXPAREL had total medical costs of about $8,390, while patients in the standard group had total medical costs of about $9,250.

While not a dramatic gap on an individual level,at scale, across thousands of patients, it adds up fast.

Of course, that doesn’t mean this approach will replace opioids entirely. But it does suggest that how pain is managed at the start can influence everything that follows. And in a system still dealing with the long-term effects of opioid overuse, that’s not a small detail.