The 2015 North American Spine Society annual meeting included a roundtable discussion on recommendations for improving the value of spine care. The panel included many different stakeholders.
The key takeaways from the roundtable were published in The Spine Journal:
1. The participants identified a need to develop commonly-defined groupings of spine pain patients. The standardized groupings would ensure fair comparisons in healthcare values and address current provider misuse through improved protocols.
2. Standardization could also avoid patient harms, including unnecessary risk exposure, disability labeling and opioid drug prescription overuse. The is a desire to establish methods for learning from actual patient care experiences on a broad scale, potentially through registries.
3. Integrating primary spine care providers who don't prescribe addictive medication as the first time treatment into the overall spine care pathways was another goal.
4. Healthcare providers can improve the value of spine pain treatment through technologies that can facilitate data collection, analysis and learning. New payment methods also move spine care specialists toward this goal.
5. There is an accelerated movement toward diverging resource consumption and updated care delivery plans that contribute to improving the overall value of spine care.