Montoy JCC, et al. - A randomized quality improvement study was conducted to ascertain whether and to what extent changes in the default settings in the electronic medical record (EMR) are linked with opioid prescriptions for individuals discharged from emergency departments (EDs). During the study period, a sum of 104 healthcare professionals wrote 4,320 prescriptions for opioids. An increase of 0.19 tablets prescribed was obtained for each tablet increase in default quantity using linear regression. A lower default was correlated with a lower number of pills prescribed in more than half (8 of the 15) of the pairwise comparisons; there was a higher quantity in 1 and no difference in 6 comparisons when assessing each of the 15 pairwise comparisons of default quantities. These findings suggest that default settings in the EMR may influence the quantity of opioids prescribed by healthcare professionals. The outcomes indicated that this low-cost, easily implementable, EMR-based intervention could have far-reaching implications for opioid prescribing and could be utilized as a tool to help combat the opioid epidemic.