Pain Management: Lessons From Michigan and West Virginia

Life happens. Pain happens. Patients navigate to the emergency room or urgent care clinic with incredible acute pain, sometimes inducing an inpatient hospital stay and perhaps resulting in a life with chronic pain. This session will portray that patient journey by providing dynamic and practical pain management best practices for clinicians and patients alike. Participants will leave with tangible practices minimizing overdose and substance use disorder risk. Improving lives. Saving lives.

The first presentation will describe how the Michigan Opioid Prescribing Engagement Network (Michigan OPEN) developed a Perioperative Pain Care Management and Coordination pathway and collaborated with a hospital organization in implementation pilots, focusing on three key components: 1) screening for perioperative risk associated with substance use, 2) communicating with patients and clinicians, and 3) coordinating care. Given Americans, on average, undergo 9.2 procedures over their lifetime, and 19.7 million Americans are diagnosed with an SUD, the need for perioperative SUD screening to avert postoperative adverse outcomes is important to providing quality care to surgical patients. Michigan OPEN’s pathway was developed in a focused, multidisciplinary collaboration across anesthesiology, surgery, addiction psychiatry, and nursing, incorporating evidence-based best practices to risk-screen surgical patients while optimizing communication across the care continuum, thereby mitigating risk of adverse postoperative outcomes related to SUDs.

From “ground zero” of the opioid crisis, the second presentation will share pain management strategies that are working in West Virginia, which continues to lead the nation statistically in drug overdose deaths, and many other states today. In 2016, an interprofessional panel of experts in pain management ― including medicine, osteopathy, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, public health, the state PDMP, and insurance providers ― developed the West Virginia Safe & Effective Management of Pain (SEMP) Guidelines (www.sempguidelines.org) including a risk reduction strategy and clinical treatment algorithms. Taking a leap beyond any and all guidelines, this session will discuss pain management best practices in a manner that will provide the audience with practical, tangible actions that can immediately be deployed into patient care.