Wilmington’s Westside Family Healthcare is turning to videoconferencing technology to deliver better treatment of chronic pain.
It’s joined the Extension for Community HealthCare Outcomes project or Project ECHO that links health care providers across the country with specialists. By making use of telemedicine technology, Westside Family Healthcare seeks to improve access to pain management specialists for their patients. 40% of the patients that enter Westside’s Wilmington clinic seek treatment for chronic pain.
“Westside actually serves individuals who are very, very challenged as being unserved or being underserved,” says Department of Health and Social Services Secretary Rita Landgraf. “So we are in a community that can benefit greatly from the ECHO project in a variety of ways.”
Landgraf says the initiative allows primary care physicians to discuss their cases with experts who have more experience treating chronic pain and preventing mistreatment.
“The physicians want to be able to support their patient in pain management and they don’t want to cause an additional problem that might be addiction,” Landgraf said. “So this actually broadens our reach, provides us with tools through technology to gain access to specialists.”
Dr. Daren Anderson, Project ECHO’s Chief Quality Officer adds it’s a very practical use of telemedicine.
“There’s an enormous need for primary care providers who are providing the brunt of care for most patients to get the support and the answers to their questions. I think all of us are saying ‘There must be a better way’ than the traditional way of sending people here and sending them there and faxing answers and all that. And this really provides that,” said Dr. Anderson.
According to Anderson, pain management involves multiple different aspects of medicine, such as behavioral health, addiction medicine, physical medicine and orthopedics.
“These aren’t things that are traditionally taught in the typical training that a primary care provider goes [through], and certainly not how to pull them all together in one patient,” he says.
Primary care physicians treat over half of all chronic pain patients, but surveys show most have low confidence in their ability to effectively manage pain. They also receive little or no pain management training or education, and according to studies, vary widely in the methods they use to document and manage their patients’ pain.
Officials expect initiative's like Project ECHO can also yield health care savings by helping patients avoid unnecessary appointments and medical tests. Chronic pain affects 100 million American adults and costs the U.S. up to $635 billion a year in treatment and lost productivity.
Since July 2012, DHSS Division of Medicaid and Medical Assistance began reimbursing providers for telemedicine-delivered consulting services, as well as establishing other sites for telehealth equipment and space. Through partnering with the Delaware Telehealth Coalition, they are looking at other ways to utilize similar technology to benefit the public. However, DHSS will evaluate the results of Project ECHO next summer before attempting to expand the technology statewide.
“We’re getting a broad population that traditionally did not have that ability to gain that access, then we can replicate it across our state,” Landgraf added, while citing other Westside locations in Middletown and Dover that are being served by the technology. “We’re attempting to use Westside as that first-model approach then to use that as the resource that can work with the ECHO project and expand it.”
