Applying Pain Population Medicine To Your Pain Management Practice
-
-
APPLYING POPULATION MEDICINE TO YOUR PAIN MANAGEMENT PRACTICE
An Invitation to a Webinar
For the past several years my rheumatologist colleague Dr. Tim Harrington and I have been working to improve health care delivery for my patients with pain and the conditions that cause it. Treating my patients first as a population, and then as cohorts and individuals within this context is a fundamentally different approach from the one-at-a-time approach that we were taught. We have just published a paper describing our new processes and results that we’d like to share with you.
Population medicine has enabled us to manage more patients when and as necessary, to identify and reduce waste, to document our results, and me to do only the care that only I can do—timely new patient evaluations, follow up visits only for problem patients, and procedures.
What is Population Medicine? It begins with developing a simple population registry, enrolling all new patients, and following a set of pain, function, and treatment measures at standard intervals for all patients. A nurse can do all of this, allowing me to understand my population’s needs for care, to divide care between my nurse practitioner colleagues and myself, and to close care gaps that we did not even understand before.
Our paper is attached. If you wish to learn more, we have developed a webinar to describe population medicine in greater detail.
David Bryce, MD
Specialty Pain Management
-
