Corey S. Davis

States, which have the primary legal role in regulating the prescribing and dispensing of prescription medications, have created Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMP) to try to reduce inappropriate prescribing, dispensing, and related harm. Research assessing whether these interventions are effective has produced inconclusive and contradictory results. Here we examine whether different data sources may have contributed to the varying results. Specifically, we: 1) identify the decisions inherent in creating such a dataset; 2) discuss the public data sources used by researchers in previous work; 3) develop and apply a detailed research protocol to create a novel PDMP law dataset; and 4) to illustrate potential consequences of data choice, apply various data sources to analyze the re...