06.05.2017

A New Guidance For Non-Opioid Pain Management

MHA, through a collaboration with Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals and Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital – Plymouth, helped develop, and will issue, provider guidance for implementing a comprehensive pain stewardship program (PSP) within healthcare facilities.

The PSP guidance provides hospitals with best practices for using multimodal analgesia-based acute pain care, which is a non-opioid treatment. Using a multimodal analgesia reduces both opioid use and length of stay. The PSP guidance provides evidence-based pain management tools to assess and improve current hospital protocols and identify areas for improvement.

MHA’s Substance Use Disorder Prevention and Treatment Task Force (SUDPTTF), consisting of substance use disorder experts and physicians from across the state, created guidelines for opioid management within a hospital setting. Recommendation #6 from the guidelines calls on facilities to develop a comprehensive pain stewardship program to ensure proper internal controls to appropriately manage patient populations. Every Massachusetts acute care hospital has signed a commitment letter to work on adopting the recommendations in the MHA guidelines.

The PSP Guidance materials were developed with the clinical input and assistance of a subset of SUDPTTF members led by John Connolly, VP of medical management and chief of the anesthesia service at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital – Plymouth.