A Case Study on How eCareMD Helps Chronic Pain Management Practices Reduce Opioid Dependency

Client Overview

The client is a pain management clinic located in Virginia, USA, serving 200+ patients having chronic pain with a pain management specialty staff including a pain specialist, Nurse practitioner, and physical therapist. While managing patients, they need to monitor patients regularly and look after patients' medication adherence. In most cases, the patient is dependent on opioids. The client needs to implement Medicare’s Remote patient monitoring with the goal of reducing Opioid dependency in their patients.

Business Challenges

1. Unable to objectively track pain levels and functional improvements

While treating the patients with chronic pain, the client’s clinic measures the pain level mostly at the time of encountering patients, and has no structured way to describe chronic pain, such as arthritis, back pain, cancer pain, nerve pain, etc. The lack of a tool to track pain level and functional improvement affects clinical staff in encountering, treating patients without having strong clinical data, such as vitals, symptoms, and pain measurement, for the right interventions.

2. High risk of opioid dependency without proper monitoring

The clinical staff had no real-time monitoring over prescribed medication, like opioids, which are used to treat patients' chronic pain, such as cancer and arthritis-related pain. Without proper control over Opioid use and adherence monitoring, the medications for pain relief become addictive and habitual in such cases; on the other hand over overconsumption of medication causes life-threatening situations and increased emergency hospital visits.

3. Patients requiring frequent office visits for pain assessment

For treating chronic pain, the patients were visiting the office frequently, causing discomfort and receiving poor quality care for pain relief. The office staff needs to keep every record of patients’ frequent visits, which mostly went undocumented cause to an unstructured documentation workflow for patient encounters. As a result, the client's practice finds difficulty in managing patients during office visits.

4. Staff overwhelmed with subjective pain reporting and documentation

The subjective pain reports of patients’ pain create overly whelming documents which contain unstructured, confused health reports, affecting coordinated care within the care team. The clinical staff had no standardized reporting system to use with different care team members. While working on a single patient, multiple staff members don’t have an integrated, structured way to share the patient’s pain report, which delays patients' follow-ups, medication management, and causes missed pain points from the patient’s health conditions.

Solution

While working under a pain management practice, the client’s practice needs to implement optimized workflows to monitor their patients, aiming to ensure patients’ good health. The client has explored care coordination software while interacting with Medarch’s team, which provides the latest tech-based care coordination software. Within the free trial month, the client has started their pain management practice on care coordination software eCareMD, which tackles the client’s several business problems by providing proactive solutions as below;

Solution Highlighted

To overcome these business challenges for patient monitoring, the client had a collaborative meeting with Medarch INC., where Medarch Inc. offers a wide range of healthcare solutions. After several interactions and live demos of eCareMD care coordination software provided by the Medarch business analyst team, the client has decided to implement the eCareMD solution for their practice to increase their care quality and patient management as follows;

1. Activity and Mobility Tracking

The patients were provided medical devices to track their daily physical activity, step count, and mobility tracking, helping the care team to oversee patients day to day barriers and health outcomes. The eCareMD streamlines this data by visualizing the trend in patients' health journeys, resulting in care teams being able to provide the right interventions.

2. Heart Rate Variability (HRV) Monitoring for Pain Insights

While monitoring the HRV, the eCareMD provides a graphical representation of heart rate vitals for predictive pain insights. This tracks signs of unmanaged pain, guiding doses for pain adjustment or intervention needs. The visualized form of a patient’s vital signs is used to predict a patient’s health journey and track expected outcomes.

3. Sleep Quality Assessment

The eCareMD has the ability to capture sleep duration and restlessness patterns with device integration, allowing the care team to track pain management effectiveness with improvements in sleep. While assigning educational material to the patients, providers are increasing patient awareness of their chronic pain, improving sleep, diet, and medication adherence. The custom assessment collects patient feedback in their comfort zone, providing care team assistance to patient on their sleep cycle.



4. AI-Powered Opioid Optimization Engine

eCareMD’s AI model follows patient activity trends, HRV, and sleep data to suggest intervention opportunities or alternative therapies according to patients' progress goals. It alerts patients with stable vitals who may benefit from non-opioid uses and alerts the care team to those needing closer evaluation.

Value Delivered

1. 55% Reduction in Opioid Prescriptions

The timely objective data supported the clinical interventions, helping to discontinue opioid use for stable patients, reducing their dependence on opioids, and improving safety.

2. Improved Functional Outcomes and Quality of Life

Patients have improved activity and sleep cycle, reported better daily outcomes, and achieved their daily goals with pain reduction.

The RPM model allowed patients to be monitored remotely, decreasing routine in-office evaluations by 40% and freeing up appointments for complex care.

4. More Accurate and Actionable Pain Management

With the combined subjective patient input with real-time physiological data, including personalized treatment care plans and an increased patient & provider collaborative process.