Yes. Complementing pain treatment with self-care and telemedicine training helps. It works because poor self-care is a top reason pain lasts for months or years, even with treatment. So teach pain patients self-care, and coach them through telemedicine. A new digital system gives doctors the lessons, remote check-ins and pay to do that coaching.
Summary: Chronic pain is hard to treat. Many people with chronic pain keep suffering for months or even years, even with medical care. Poor chronic pain care has helped feed the opioid epidemic. One way to beat chronic pain is to teach patients. Teaching patients self-care will help them manage pain and prevent future flare-ups. But doctors lack the time and drive to teach patients, because they are not paid for it. The new digital system tries to close this gap. It gives doctors a system to teach patients. It can plug into any electronic health record. It uses smart algorithms, predictive analytics, and more. It also makes sure health workers get fair pay for teaching patients. Chronic pain is one of the leading causes of disability. US data shows that almost one-fifth of adults live with chronic pain, and about 8% have severe pain. Poorly managed chronic pain is also one of the reasons for the opioid epidemic in the US. So doctors need to check their patients’ pain scores often and adjust treatment plans. Doctors should prescribe medicine. They should also support and coach patients in self-care. The problem is that doctors lack time and tools. They are also not paid for better ongoing patient support.
Patient-centered addiction and chronic pain care
This model of care tries to close the gap in patient care. It gives patients telemedicine coaching to manage chronic pain and lower its risk. It also closes another gap: it pays health workers to train patients in self-care through telemedicine. Telemedicine care includes the following: ● Proven tools to assess pain and risk. ● A patient platform with digital lessons that plug right into any electronic health record system. Based on the EHR, the program can give each patient personal training. It can also help track results from afar. ● Telemedicine coaching pushes patients to change their lifestyle. That helps them recover from pain faster. ● A remote dashboard that helps doctors track how the patient is doing. ● It also has predictive analytics that use artificial intelligence to predict long-term health results.
Patient-centered transformative care
The key thing about the program is that it keeps patients highly engaged. That helps them make the changes they need. It uses these strategies: ● Build a well-structured pain program, and coach patients from afar. It focuses on seven parts of a patient’s life: body, lifestyle, mind, emotions, spirit, environment, and social life. ● The program helps shift care to center on the patient. That gives patients more power and more engagement, and so it improves long-term results. ● The program pushes shared decisions. The patient comes to understand the condition better, and the work becomes shared too. ● It builds support from family and friends, who play a key role in easing pain and managing addiction. ● It helps create interactive lessons that are easy for patients to remember and build into their lives. ● Make a simple action plan that a patient can follow. Studies show that more than fifty percent of chronic pain cases still have pain even after a month. Worse, many keep having pain for several years. This happens even with the best treatment. It appears that in many cases, the cause is that patients never got self-management training. So transformative care can give doctors the right tools to shift to patient-centered care. It gives health workers the digital tools for this change and helps them teach patients. Transformative care offers research-based tools that take little of the doctor’s time. They help with remote monitoring and have predictive data analytics. It also solves the problem of payment by health plans. To sum up, chronic pain is hard to manage. Patients keep having pain even after months of treatment. It appears the main cause is that patients manage their pain poorly on their own, because doctors lack the time and tools to teach them. So new transformative care digital tools try to fill this gap. That helps patients get better results.
Related reading: Chronic Pain and Opioid Use Disorder · Hard to Find a Doctor When You Take Opioids for Pain · Early Chronic Pain Risk Identification Cuts Opioid Use · Pain Management Rehab in St. Louis