What's Working in Pain Management
Chronic pain can affect an individual’s financial well-being or create roadblocks in day-to-day life: many chronic pain patients lose an average of 4.6 hours per week, which costs employers $61.2 billion annually. To relieve the physical and fiscal suffering associated with pain, many healthcare organizations have implemented pain management programs. To discover how these programs work and who is using them, HIN conducted a non-scientific online survey in April 2008. In response, 186 organizations, including hospitals, nursing homes and health plans, shared their experiences with pain management programs.
To download this complimentary white paper, please visit:
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Disease Prevention is Top Priority for Americans in Health Reform
A public opinion survey released by Trust for America's Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) found that Americans rank prevention as the most important healthcare reform priority and overwhelmingly support increasing funding for prevention programs to reduce disease and keep people healthy. The poll reflects the responses from 1,014 registered voters.
In the poll, 70 percent of Americans ranked investing in prevention between an eight and 10 on a scale of zero to 10, where zero means not at all an important healthcare priority and 10 means very important. Forty-six percent rated prevention as a 10 out of 10. Overall, prevention was rated higher than all other proposals, including providing tax credits to small businesses and prohibiting health insurers from denying coverage based on health status.
"For too long, healthcare has focused on treating people after they become sick instead of trying to help them stay healthy in the first place," said Jeff Levi, Ph.D., executive director of TFAH. "This poll shows the American public strongly believes it's time we shift from a sick care system to a true healthcare system that stresses disease prevention."
More than three-quarters of Americans (76 percent) support increasing funding for prevention programs that provide people with information and resources and creating policies that help people make healthier choices. Investing in prevention is popular across the political spectrum, with 86 percent of Democrats, 71 percent of Republicans, and 70 percent of Independents supporting investing more in prevention.
While 77 percent of Americans agree with the statement that "prevention will save us money," they strongly support prevention regardless of its impact on costs. Rather, they point clearly to keeping people healthy as the best reason to invest in prevention, with 72 percent agreeing with the statement that "investing in prevention is worth it even if it doesn't save us money, because it will prevent disease and save lives." Additionally, 57 percent agree more with the statement "we should invest in prevention to keep people healthier and improve quality of life" than the statement "we should invest in prevention to lower healthcare costs" (21 percent).
Americans believe the nation needs to put more emphasis on prevention (59 percent) rather than thinking there needs to be more emphasis on treatment (15 percent), by nearly a four to one ratio. This represents a significant shift toward prevention over the last two decades — in 1987, only 45 percent thought there should be greater emphasis on prevention.
To learn more about this research, please visit:
http://healthyamericans.org/newsroom/releases/?releaseid=179
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Healthcare Trends Mid-2009
Suffering from project overload due to frozen resources? Adjusting decision-making, pricing, marketing and more to compensate for reduced revenues in a depressed economic climate? You are not alone. To learn how your healthcare colleagues are responding to the current economic and legislative environments, take HIN's Survey of the Month on Healthcare Trends in 2009: Mid-Year Adjustment by June 30. Nearly 50 healthcare organizations have responded so far. You'll get a free executive summary of the compiled results. Your responses will be kept strictly confidential.
To participate in this survey and receive its results, please visit:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/...
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The National Headache Foundation (NHF) is launching “Headache U: It’s all about YOU,” the first headache education program of its kind designed to help people with headaches take important steps toward getting relief. The program is offered on the NHF Web site at 
Too often, pain management tends to focus on the conditions rather than the people experiencing the pain, says Dr. Agostino Villani, internationally recognized expert on chronic pain, CEO of Triad Healthcare, Inc., and author of Pain Is Not A Disease. According to Dr. Villani, this way of thinking depersonalizes the experience of pain and treats it as a disease instead of the complex, personal event that it really is. In Part 1 of this interview with Dr. Villani, he discusses his new book as well as pain management programs, pain level reduction strategies and side effects of pain medications. In Part 2, Dr. Villani discusses the importance of the physician-patient relationship, measuring the outcomes of pain management and med school curricula surrounding the topic of pain management.
