Please leave your
details to watch the video

Enjoy the video!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

High-stress holidays meet high-touch needs of chronic pain care: 3 tips to ease provider workloads

Read time: 5 mins

It may come as no surprise that most American adults – nearly nine in 10 – feel stressed during the holidays. The change in season also brings increased respiratory illnesses, chronic condition flareups, and injuries (let’s be careful on those ladders!).

These trends can correlate to a more than 25% increase in ER visits during the holiday months.

As we pass by the notorious “October Slide” (ICYMI: a trending term referring to how cooling temps, lack of sunshine, and other changes can worsen chronic symptoms as fall sets in), the impact on providers already stretched thin can feel overwhelming.

Chronic pain is more frequently than not accompanied by mental health comorbidities among patients who are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of stress, giving providers a unique opportunity to pursue virtual care tactics that can help alleviate the pressures of seasonal demand.  

Before we get to our 3 tips to ease provider workloads during this most joyful season, let’s look at one patient’s experience as they navigate living with chronic pain…  

Case in point: Accessing high-touch cognitive care anyway the wind blows 

A care practitioner cannot reasonably be available for their patient every time the wind blows. But, for some patients living with chronic pain, changes in temperature, wind, lighting, and other environmental conditions are known to elicit a pain response.

This was the case for one patient whose pain began 35 years ago after a severe sinus infection. While the infection had long been cured, the patient explained how the pain was “a signal stuck in my brain,” noting how “cold air and even cool breezes set my pain off.”

The patient shared that after years of treatments and medications, they found Lin Health’s digital chronic pain recovery platform and were drawn in by the low-risk, non-invasive, cognitive-based approach. Live, high-touch virtual coaching and access to therapeutic tools focused on retraining the brain helped the patient reduce pain signaling through a behavioral approach.

After working with Lin Health, the patient reports significant relief and less dependence on opioids to manage pain, cutting down Hydrocodone usage by half. In their words: “Now, I can take the dog out, go to the store, and take a short walk without a pain attack! When I feel a little pain starting to stir up, I no longer fear it and it stays mild.”

3 tips to ease provider workloads during this most joyful season

As reinforced by the above example, patients living with chronic pain often require consistent, high-frequency, comprehensive cognitive support to break their pain cycles. Virtual care offers an opportunity to deliver purpose-built solutions that address this population’s unique needs – while offering providers a valve release.

Here are our tips to help clinicians bring more efficiency (and dare we say joy?) to chronic pain care, while delivering next-generation, evidence-based treatment to struggling patients:

  1. Segment patients based on whether their needs can be met in-person, or if their care calls for a high-touch approach:

    Chronic pain flareups don’t always have a clear treatment pathway to quickly resolve patient discomfort – yet many conditions are more straightforward and easier to heal. By offloading unexplained chronic pain symptoms to a trustworthy virtual care partner specialized in nervous system-based treatment, your patients living with chronic pain can receive care designed specifically for their needs that goes beyond generalized behavioral support meant for “coping.” This allows your practice to support a higher patient volume during peak demand – or free up overly strained resources to improve provider morale and satisfaction.

    Tip #2 provides the blueprint to do this at scale.

  2. Implement universal screening for chronic pain:

    Patients living with diverse chronic pain symptoms – back and neck pain, migraine, fibromyalgia, IBS, pelvic pain, plantar fasciitis, and many others – have shown responsiveness to a multi-disciplinary, behavioral treatment for chronic pain that focuses on retraining the brain signaling pathways. However, regardless of what side of the desk you stand on, no one wants more paperwork at the doctor’s office. The good news is that brain-generated pain can be indicated by simply confirming that symptoms:

    • Recurred multiple times for three months or more,
    • Occurred in more than one body part, or
    • Increased in severity due to stress.

    These three simple questions are likely worth the tradeoffs if it means your patient can avoid a lifetime of pain and discomfort. It can open patients up to a virtual care option proven to help with chronic pain, backed by years of change management experience streamlining patient identification, referrals, enrollment, as well as administrative efforts like insurance eligibility checks. With Lin Health’s whole-person, holistic approach to chronic pain care, many patients can get back to things they love and a higher quality of life, offering a virtuous cycle that improves their health more broadly as well.

  3. Expand treatment options to help manage routine care for stable patients living with chronic pain, while offering support in-between visits:

    A high-touch approach can mean engaging patients living with chronic pain two to three times per week on average. Implementing an AI-enabled, collaborative care platform can facilitate this highly scalable treatment model, while freeing up providers to operate at the top of their license and serve more patients day-to-day. And by offering one-to-one live coaching sessions with a highly trained Pain Recovery Coach, with unlimited asynchronous messaging and 24/7 access to clinically validated digital care resources, your patients always have somewhere to turn as an adjunct to the care your team provides.

    This keeps patients on your panel while reducing your caseload, meets their care needs while driving patient satisfaction on their road to recovery, and helps offset the risks of clinician burnout. And, in some cases, a virtual, non-pharmacological intervention can help steer individuals away from harmful coping mechanisms by providing a consistent resource for support and encouragement.

Win, win – and one more win for good measure. 

Learn more about how Lin Health can support your patient population in shifting from “October sliding” to “holiday thriving.” Get in touch with our team to explore expanding access to next-generation virtual care that helps your patients reclaim their lives from chronic pain.

"Incredible resource for those that have experienced chronic pain"

Sarah L
Reviewed on

Where should we send the link to the video?

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.