We posted earlier this week on draft guidelines for pain management issued by the Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents. While we found much to like in the draft, our colleague Peter Rousmaniere, proprietor of his own blog on immigration issues, finds that the guidelines leave much to be desired. He views them as somewhat of a mincing mini-step in an area where rather big strides are needed.
Here are his thoughts on ways to make pain guidelines more effective:
Workers Comp Insider alerted us on Monday to the publication of draft chronic pain guidelines by Massachusetts DIA.
Medical treatment guidelines are helpful where clinicians, payers and courts desire an authoritative third party to say if and when a treatment is appropriate. But the value of guidelines really strikes home not only in the details but in how they pick their topics. Only so much can be covered proficiently. Guidelines need to focus on pressing matters of protecting lives and husbanding scarce resources. Then even the non-clinician in workers comp can say, “I may not understand all the medical details, but I know that these guidelines speak to my top concerns, and I will respect them and promote them accordingly.”
Perhaps because workers comp chronic pain treatment guidelines tend to avoid some of the most pressing issues for claims payers, they are not as useful as they could be. Perhaps also because claims payers feel free to ignore them, which they regularly do, we don’t see a visible, sustained effort within the claims payer community to improve the management of chronic pain cases.
Something for the Pain
One thing the guidelines have done laudably is to alert their readers to the very important patient safety issue when opioids are prescribed. This is very important: claims payers usually don’t require periodic drug tests for injured workers who have been prescribed opiates and they rarely are trained to respond when a test shows that the patient’s urine has no trace of the prescribed drug.
On balance, the Massachusetts guidelines, like other chronic pain guidelines used in the workers compensation community, are rather narrowly focused to the point where their usefulness is compromised. These various guidelines focus on non-surgical treatment of patients after they reach the stage at which they can be called chronic pain cases, and before they become extended, multi-year dependents on pain medication.The proposed guidelines devote just a few summary paragraphs to a challenge of the highest importance to claims payers: knowing the specific steps physicians can take to help their extended treatment patients improve their pain experience and function.
Predicting Pain
None of the current guidelines invest any time in describing the quite rich and fertile topic of chronic pain prevention among newly injured workers. Prediction and prevention are areas in which only a few occupational medicine doctors and nurses have achieved proficiency. Claims payers should focus on the need to identify chronic pain risk and encourage doctors to intervene as early as possible, when chronic pain risk, having been identified, can be addressed before the downward cycle begins. Unfortunately, you won’t learn about these best practices in these or in other state-promulgated guidelines. (I have proposed that chronic pain predictive models, matured through the wisdom of many, be placed in the public domain and inserted in treatment guidelines.)
Why these gaps? I wonder if the claims community has taken the time to communicate its concerns about chronic pain, so that guideline editors might address them? I imagine that they were back at the office, unaware of guidelines being drafted, and deeply involved in the deep stack of files that welcome them every working day.
Let’s Talk!
An inconvenient truth for workers comp claims payers is the universal endorsement of counseling intervention. Virtually all the chronic pain guidelines share a high regard for the psychological dimension of non-cancer chronic pain, which surfaces in pain perceptions and beliefs, catastrophizing, poor locus of control, and other traits that can be both measured and altered. The guidelines recommend time-limited cognitive behavioral therapy, the kind used to help you, say, overcome your anxiety about elevators, re-injury, or perpetual pain. The Massachusetts guidelines contain within their relatively thin girth a full-throated endorsement of psychological intervention – and that’s a good thing.
Unfortunately, most claims adjusters refuse to recognize the importance of cognitive therapy. They will have none of it and will deny treatment if the word “psychology” is attached to a request for treatment. The adjusters argue that once they allow psychological treatment, the workers comp courts will require them to pay for a lifetime of counseling intervention. I’ve heard this argument a lot. I wonder if the claims community and treatment guideline editors have ever had an extended discussion about psychological services and how to frame the issue to be most useful in a workers comp setting.
While the proposed pain guidelines leave a lot to be desired, I believe that an effective strategy for controlling chronic pain risk is within reach. Pain management is an essential element of any cost reduction strategy. If states can begin to draft chronic pain treatment guidelines that are more prescriptive, more specific and more focused on prediction and prevention, we would take a giant step toward bringing the costs of many large comp claims under control.
Submitted by Peter Rousmaniere