A new approach to chronic pain care for employers

• Key insight: Discover how reframing chronic pain as a stand-alone condition unlocks more effective benefit strategies.
• What’s at stake: Untreated chronic pain increases absenteeism, presenteeism, disability claims, and healthcare costs.
• Looking ahead: Expect employer strategies to prioritize virtual behavioral pain care and vendor measures based on results.
  Source: AI generated bullets with editorial review

Although many organizations have expanded their healthcare offerings to meet the needs of their workforce, chronic pain persists. forgotten and underfunded.

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Nearly a third of people worldwide experience some form of chronic pain, according to data from digital mental health platform Calm Health, making it the number one reason people seek health care. Additionally, chronic pain is the main reason behind long overtime, increased leave, and increased levels of stress and depression. Today, the effort of the workers dealing with chronic conditions It may not work as well as leaders hope, but a shift in benefits strategy and communication can help.

“The brand is the delivery that we’re missing,” said Dr. Eric Anderson, neurologist and chief medical officer at Lin Health, a virtual healthcare company. “The diagnosis exists. The evidence exists. But the average patient still bounces between specialists for years, piling up scans, prescriptions and procedures, without ever being offered treatment that matches their condition.”

Read more: Why migraine support should be part of your chronic care strategy

Several systemic barriers limit effective chronic pain care. There are too few pain psychologists to meet the demandreimbursement models favor procedures and prescriptions over the time-intensive behavioral care that patients require, and chronic pain often falls between the medical and behavioral health systems without clear clinical ownership. At the same time, many doctors receive it little training in the modern neuroscience of painleaving patients with the impression that medication, surgery, or simply living with the pain are the only options, even though current evidence supports a more comprehensive approach to treatment.

“For the worker, untreated or poorly treated chronic pain is corrosive in the way it’s excessive, and it doesn’t stay in the back or neck,” Anderson said. “It affects sleep, mood, relationships and identity.”

For businesses, according to Anderson, it appears in every column of the book. Chronic pain is one of them the most expensive conditions in any occupied population With direct costs in the hundreds of billions nationally, direct medical spending is arguably the smallest portion.

Read more: How to deal with the chronic disease trifecta

“The presenteeism is silent: the workers are at their desk but they are functioning at 60% because they slept four hours and the pain is seven,” said Anderson. “Add absenteeism, disability claims and turnover, and pain quietly becomes one of the biggest impediments to an employer’s productivity.”

The good news, according to Anderson, is that to cover a large part of the subject it’s not a heavy lift for leaders.

Four questions to ask when reviewing benefits

Employers reviewing pain care benefits should focus on four questions: whether employees have easy access to evidence-based behavioral pain care, whether virtual delivery removes barriers to treatment, whether vendors report. significant clinical results rather than engagement measures, and where care is coordinated with the workforce’s existing providers, rather than operating as a stand-alone application.

Collaborate with clinical platforms it can also be beneficial. At Lin Health, for example, 92 percent of people who completed their program (which offers a virtual trainer-led service program with weekly telehealth appointments) reported improvement, and a large portion of those who took their pain medication went completely off their pain medication.

Read more: Breaking the ‘autoimmune career ceiling’: How chronic disease care is helping the workforce

“Start treating chronic pain as its own condition, not a footnote in an MSK or pharmaceutical line item,” Anderson said. “Once framed in this way, when the strategy becomes clearer (and) the right treatment reaches the right patient, the results are really different from the benefits that leaders expect.”

When asked where he wanted to see chronic aids growAnderson said she would like to see depression or diabetes treated the way it is treated: as a real, defined condition with a standard of care, an expected path and hope for recovery, not just management.

“I’ve seen people who spent 10 or 20 years in pain get their lives back in a matter of months,” Anderson said. “Once you’ve seen that enough times, you stop thinking of yourself as the cool outsider and start thinking of yourself as the standard everyone deserves. That’s the future I’m working towards.”