Commentary on Perry et al.: New means, new measures—without discarding all the previous ones

Starting from the observation that there is little agreement in the literature about how to best operationalize prescription drug-seeking (PDS), Perry et al. compared the performances of multiple PDS indicators during 10 years of the opioid epidemic in the United States [1]. The authors illustrated the value of a network centrality measure (PageRank) that they had introduced recently [2]. The method uses patterns of co-prescription ties between patients and prescribers to identify irregular and excessive prescribing activity that cluster around central actors.