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A True Community: The Vet-to-Vet Program for Chronic Pain
A True Community: The Vet-to-Vet Program for Chronic Pain
The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) has continued to advance its understanding and treatment of chronic pain. The VHA National Pain Management Strategy emphasizes the significance of the social context of pain while underscoring the importance of self-management.1 This established strategy ensures that all veterans have access to the appropriate pain care in the proper setting.2 VHA has instituted a stepped care model of pain management, delineating the domains of primary care, secondary consultative services, and tertiary care.3 This directive emphasized a biopsychosocial approach to pain management to prioritize the relationship between biological, psychological, and social factors that influence how veterans experience pain and should commensurately influence how it is managed.
The VHA Office of Patient-Centered Care and Cultural Transformation implemented the Whole Health System of Care as part of the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, which included a VHA directive to expand pain management.4,5 Reorientation within this system shifts from defining veterans as passive care recipients to viewing them as active partners in their own care and health. This partnership places additional emphasis on peer-led explorations of mission, aspiration, and purpose.6
Peer-led groups, also known as mutual aid, mutual support, and mutual help groups, have historically been successful for patients undergoing treatment for substance use disorders (eg, Alcoholics Anonymous).7 Mutual help groups have 3 defining characteristics. First, they are run by participants, not professionals, though the latter may have been integral in the founding of the groups. Second, participants share a similar problem (eg, disease state, experience, disposition). Finally, there is a reciprocal exchange of information and psychological support among participants.8,9 Mutual help groups that address chronic pain are rare but becoming more common.10-12 Emerging evidence suggests a positive relationship between peer support and improved well-being, self-efficacy, pain management, and pain self-management skills (eg, activity pacing).13-15
Storytelling as a tool for healing has a long history in indigenous and Western medical traditions.16-19 This includes the treatment of chronic disease, including pain.20,21 The use of storytelling in health care overlaps with the role it plays within many mutual help groups focused on chronic disease treatment.22 Storytelling allows an individual to share their experience with a disease, and take a more active role in their health, and facilitate stronger bonds with others.22 In effect, storytelling is not only important to group cohesion—it also plays a role in an individual’s healing.
Vet-to-Vet
The VHA Office of Rural Health funds Vet-to-Vet, a peer-to-peer program to address limited access to care for rural veterans with chronic pain. Similar to the VHA National Pain Management Strategy, Vet-to-Vet is grounded in the significance of the social context of pain and underscores the importance of self-management.1 The program combines pain care, mutual help, and storytelling to support veterans living with chronic pain. While the primary focus of Vet-to-Vet is rural veterans, the program serves any veteran experiencing chronic pain who is isolated from services, including home-bound urban veterans.
Following mutual help principles, Vet-to-Vet peer facilitators lead weekly online drop-in meetings. Meetings follow the general structure of reiterating group ground rules and sharing an individual pain story, followed by open discussions centered on well-being, chronic pain management, or any topic the group wishes to discuss. Meetings typically end with a mindfulness exercise. The organizational structure that supports Vet-to-Vet includes the implementation support team, site leads, Vet-to-Vet peer facilitators, and national partners (Figure 1).
Implementation Support Team
The implementation support team consists of a principal investigator, coinvestigator, program manager, and program support specialist. The team provides facilitator training, monthly community practice sessions for Vet-to-Vet peer facilitators and site leads, and weekly office hours for site leads. The implementation support team also recruits new Vet-to-Vet sites; potential new locations ideally have an existing whole health program, leadership support, committed site and cosite leads, and ≥ 3 peer facilitator volunteers.
Site Leads
Most site and cosite leads are based in whole health or pain management teams and are whole health coaches or peer support specialists. The site lead is responsible for standing up the program and documenting encounters, recruiting and supporting peer facilitators and participants, and overseeing the meeting. During meetings, site leads generally leave their cameras off and only speak when called into the group; the peer facilitators lead the meetings. The implementation support team recommends that site leads dedicate ≥ 4 hours per week to Vet-to-Vet; 2 hours for weekly group meetings and 2 hours for documentation (ie, entering notes into the participants’ electronic health records) and supporting peer facilitators and participants. Cosite lead responsibilities vary by location, with some sites having 2 leads that equally share duties and others having a primary lead and a colead available if the site lead is unable to attend a meeting.
Vet-to-Vet Peer Facilitators
Peer facilitators are the core of the program. They lead meetings from start to finish. Like participants, they also experience chronic pain and are volunteers. The implementation support team encourages sites to establish volunteer peer facilitators, rather than assigning peer support specialists to facilitate meetings. Veterans are eager to connect and give back to their communities, and the Vet-to-Vet peer facilitator role is an opportunity for those unable to work to connect with peers and add meaning to their lives. Even if a VHA employee is a veteran who has chronic pain, they are not eligible to serve as this could create a service provider/service recipient dynamic that is not in the spirit of mutual help.
Vet-to-Vet peer facilitators attend a virtual 3-day training held by the implementation support team prior to starting. These training sessions are available on a quarterly basis and facilitated by the Vet-to-Vet program manager and 2 current peer facilitators. Training content includes established whole health facilitator training materials and program-specific storytelling training materials. Once trained, peer facilitators attend storytelling practice sessions and collaborate with their site leads during weekly meetings.
Participants
Vet-to-Vet participants find the program through direct outreach from site leads, word of mouth, and referrals. The only criteria to join are that the individual is a veteran who experiences chronic pain and is enrolled in the VHA (site leads can assist with enrollment if needed). Participants are not required to have a diagnosis or engage in any other health care. There is no commitment and no end date. Some participants only come once; others have attended for > 3 years. This approach is intended to embrace the idea that the need for support ebbs and flows.
National Partners
The VHA Office of Rural Health provides technical support. The Center for Development and Civic Engagement onboards peer facilitators as VHA volunteers. The Office of Patient-Centered Care and Cultural Transformation provides national guidance and site-level collaboration. The VHA Pain Management, Opioid Safety, and Prescription Drug Monitoring Program supports site recruitment. In addition to the VHA partners, 4 veteran evaluation consultants who have experience with chronic pain but do not participate in Vet-to-Vet meetings provide advice on evaluation activities, such as question development and communication strategies.
Evaluation
This evaluation shares preliminary results from a pilot evaluation of the Rocky Mountain Regional VA Medical Center (RMRVAMC) Vet-to-Vet group. It is intended for program improvement, was deemed nonresearch by the Colorado Multiple Institutional Review Board, and was structured using the RE-AIM (Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance) framework.23 This evaluation focused on capturing measures related to reach and effectiveness, while a forthcoming evaluation includes elements of adoption, implementation, and maintenance.
In 2022, 16 Vet-to-Vet peer facilitators and participants completed surveys and interviews to share their experience. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded in ATLAS.ti. A priori codes were based on interview guide questions and emergent descriptive codes were used to identify specific topics which were categorized into RE-AIM domains, barriers, facilitators, what participants learned, how participants applied what they learned to their lives, and participant reported outcomes. This article contains high-level findings from the evaluation; more detailed results will be included in the ongoing evaluation.
Results
The RMRVAMC Vet-to-Vet group has met weekly since April 2022. Four Vet-to-Vet peer facilitators and 12 individuals participated in the pilot Vet-to-Vet group and evaluation. The mean age was 62 years, most were men, and half were married. Most participants lived in rural areas with a mean distance of 125 miles to the nearest VAMC. Many experienced multiple kinds of pain, with a mean 4.5 on a 10-point scale (bothered “a lot”). All participants reported that they experienced pain daily.
Participation in Vet-to-Vet meetings was high; 3 of 4 peer facilitators and 7 of 12 participants completed the first 6 months of the program. In interviews, participants described the positive impact of the program. They emphasized the importance of connecting with other veterans and helping one another, with one noting that opportunities to connect with other veterans “just drops off a lot” (peer facilitator 3) after leaving active duty.
Some participants and Vet-to-Vet peer facilitators outlined the content of the sessions (eg, learning about how pain impacts the body and one’s family relationships) and shared the skills they learned (eg, goal setting, self-advocacy) (Table). Most spoke about learning from one another and the power of sharing stories with one peer facilitator sharing how they felt that witnessing another participant’s story “really shifted how I was thinking about things and how I perceived people” (peer facilitator 1).
Participants reported several ways the program impacted their lives, such as learning that they could get help, how to get help, and how to overcome the mental aspects of chronic pain. One veteran shared profound health impacts and attributed the Vet-to-Vet program to having one of the best years of their life. Even those who did not attend many meetings spoke of it positively and stated that it should continue so others could try (Table).
From January 2022 to September 2025, > 80 veterans attended ≥ 1 meeting at RMRVAMC; 29 attended ≥ 1 meeting in the last quarter. There were > 1400 Vet-to-Vet encounters at RMRVAMC, with a mean (SD) of 14.2 (19.2) and a median of 4.5 encounters per participant. Half of the veterans attend ≥ 5 meetings, and one-third attended ≥ 10 meetings.
Since June 2023, 15 additional VHA facilities launched Vet-to-Vet programs. As of October 2025, > 350 veterans have participated in ≥ 1 Vet-to-Vet meeting, totaling > 4500 Vet-to-Vet encounters since the program’s inception (Figure 2).
Challenges
The RMRVAMC site and cosite leads are part of the national implementation team and dedicate substantial time to developing the program: 40 and 10 hours per week, respectively. Site leads at new locations do not receive funding for Vet-to-Vet activities and are recommended to dedicate only 4 hours per week to the program. Formally embedding Vet-to-Vet into the site leads’ roles is critical for sustainment.
The Vet-to-Vet model has changed. The initial Vet-to-Vet cohort included the 6-week Taking Charge of My Life and Health curriculum prior to moving to the mutual help format.24 While this curriculum still informs peer facilitator training, it is not used in new groups. It has anecdotally been reported that this change was positive, but the impact of this adaptation is unknown.
This evaluation cohort was small (16 participants) and initial patient reported and administrative outcomes were inconclusive. However, most veterans who stopped participating in Vet-to-Vet spoke fondly of their experiences with the program.
CONCLUSIONS
Vet-to-Vet is a promising new initiative to support self-management and social connection in chronic pain care. The program employs a mutual help approach and storytelling to empower veterans living with chronic pain. The effectiveness of these strategies will be evaluated, which will inform its continued growth. The program's current goals focus on sustainment at existing sites and expansion to new sites to reach more rural veterans across the VA enterprise. While Vet-to-Vet is designed to serve those who experience chronic pain, a partnership with the Office of Whole Health has established goals to begin expanding this model to other chronic conditions in 2026.
- Kerns RD, Philip EJ, Lee AW, Rosenberger PH. Implementation of the Veterans Health Administration national pain management strategy. Transl Behav Med. 2011;1:635-643. doi:10.1007/s13142-011-0094-3
- Pain Management, Opioid Safety, and PDMP (PMOP). US Department of Veterans Affairs. Updated August 21, 2025. Accessed September 25, 2025. https://www.va.gov/PAINMANAGEMENT/Providers/IntegratedTeambasedPainCare.asp
- US Department of Veterans Affairs. VHA Directive 2009-053. October 28, 2009. Accessed September 25, 2025. https://www.va.gov/PAINMANAGEMENT/docs/VHA09PainDirective.pdf
- Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2016, S524, 114th Cong (2015-2016). Pub L No. 114-198. July 22, 2016. Accessed September 25, 2025. https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/524
- Bokhour B, Hyde J, Zeliadt, Mohr D. Whole Health System of Care Evaluation. US Department of Veterans Affairs. February 18, 2020. Accessed September 25, 2025. https://www.va.gov/WHOLEHEALTH/docs/EPCC_WHSevaluation_FinalReport_508.pdf
- Gaudet T, Kligler B. Whole health in the whole system of the veterans administration: how will we know we have reached this future state? J Altern Complement Med. 2019;25:S7-S11. doi:10.1089/acm.2018.29061.gau
- Kelly JF, Yeterian JD. The role of mutual-help groups in extending the framework of treatment. Alcohol Res Health. 2011;33:350-355.
- Humphreys K. Self-help/mutual aid organizations: the view from Mars. Subst Use Misuse. 1997;32:2105-2109. doi:10.3109/10826089709035622
- Chinman M, Kloos B, O’Connell M, Davidson L. Service providers’ views of psychiatric mutual support groups. J Community Psychol. 2002;30:349-366. doi:10.1002/jcop.10010
- Shue SA, McGuire AB, Matthias MS. Facilitators and barriers to implementation of a peer support intervention for patients with chronic pain: a qualitative study. Pain Med. 2019;20:1311-1320. doi:10.1093/pm/pny229
- Pester BD, Tankha H, Caño A, et al. Facing pain together: a randomized controlled trial of the effects of Facebook support groups on adults with chronic pain. J Pain. 2022;23:2121-2134. doi:10.1016/j.jpain.2022.07.013
- Matthias MS, McGuire AB, Kukla M, Daggy J, Myers LJ, Bair MJ. A brief peer support intervention for veterans with chronic musculoskeletal pain: a pilot study of feasibility and effectiveness. Pain Med. 2015;16:81-87. doi:10.1111/pme.12571
- Finlay KA, Elander J. Reflecting the transition from pain management services to chronic pain support group attendance: an interpretative phenomenological analysis. Br J Health Psychol. 2016;21:660-676. doi:10.1111/bjhp.12194
- Finlay KA, Peacock S, Elander J. Developing successful social support: an interpretative phenomenological analysis of mechanisms and processes in a chronic pain support group. Psychol Health. 2018;33:846-871. doi:10.1080/08870446.2017.1421188
- Farr M, Brant H, Patel R, et al. Experiences of patient-led chronic pain peer support groups after pain management programs: a qualitative study. Pain Med. 2021;22:2884-2895. doi:10.1093/pm/pnab189
- Mehl-Madrona L. Narrative Medicine: The Use of History and Story in the Healing Process. Bear & Company; 2007.
- Fioretti C, Mazzocco K, Riva S, Oliveri S, Masiero M, Pravettoni G. Research studies on patients’ illness experience using the Narrative Medicine approach: a systematic review. BMJ Open. 2016;6:e011220. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2016-011220
- Hall JM, Powell J. Understanding the person through narrative. Nurs Res Pract. 2011;2011:293837. doi:10.1155/2011/293837
- Ricks L, Kitchens S, Goodrich T, Hancock E. My story: the use of narrative therapy in individual and group counseling. J Creat Ment Health. 2014;9:99-110. doi:10.1080/15401383.2013.870947
- Hydén L-C. Illness and narrative. Sociol Health Illn. 1997;19:48-69. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9566.1997.tb00015.x
- Georgiadis E, Johnson MI. Incorporating personal narratives in positive psychology interventions to manage chronic pain. Front Pain Res (Lausanne). 2023;4:1253310. doi:10.3389/fpain.2023.1253310
- Gucciardi E, Jean-Pierre N, Karam G, Sidani S. Designing and delivering facilitated storytelling interventions for chronic disease self-management: a scoping review. BMC Health Serv Res. 2016;16:249. doi:10.1186/s12913-016-1474-7
- Glasgow RE, Vogt TM, Boles SM. Evaluating the public health impact of health promotion interventions: the RE-AIM framework. Am J Public Health. 1999;89:1322-1327. doi:10.2105/ajph.89.9.1322
- Abadi M, Richard B, Shamblen S, et al. Achieving whole health: a preliminary study of TCMLH, a group-based program promoting self-care and empowerment among veterans. Health Educ Behav. 2022;49:347-357. doi:10.1177/10901981211011043
The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) has continued to advance its understanding and treatment of chronic pain. The VHA National Pain Management Strategy emphasizes the significance of the social context of pain while underscoring the importance of self-management.1 This established strategy ensures that all veterans have access to the appropriate pain care in the proper setting.2 VHA has instituted a stepped care model of pain management, delineating the domains of primary care, secondary consultative services, and tertiary care.3 This directive emphasized a biopsychosocial approach to pain management to prioritize the relationship between biological, psychological, and social factors that influence how veterans experience pain and should commensurately influence how it is managed.
The VHA Office of Patient-Centered Care and Cultural Transformation implemented the Whole Health System of Care as part of the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, which included a VHA directive to expand pain management.4,5 Reorientation within this system shifts from defining veterans as passive care recipients to viewing them as active partners in their own care and health. This partnership places additional emphasis on peer-led explorations of mission, aspiration, and purpose.6
Peer-led groups, also known as mutual aid, mutual support, and mutual help groups, have historically been successful for patients undergoing treatment for substance use disorders (eg, Alcoholics Anonymous).7 Mutual help groups have 3 defining characteristics. First, they are run by participants, not professionals, though the latter may have been integral in the founding of the groups. Second, participants share a similar problem (eg, disease state, experience, disposition). Finally, there is a reciprocal exchange of information and psychological support among participants.8,9 Mutual help groups that address chronic pain are rare but becoming more common.10-12 Emerging evidence suggests a positive relationship between peer support and improved well-being, self-efficacy, pain management, and pain self-management skills (eg, activity pacing).13-15
Storytelling as a tool for healing has a long history in indigenous and Western medical traditions.16-19 This includes the treatment of chronic disease, including pain.20,21 The use of storytelling in health care overlaps with the role it plays within many mutual help groups focused on chronic disease treatment.22 Storytelling allows an individual to share their experience with a disease, and take a more active role in their health, and facilitate stronger bonds with others.22 In effect, storytelling is not only important to group cohesion—it also plays a role in an individual’s healing.
Vet-to-Vet
The VHA Office of Rural Health funds Vet-to-Vet, a peer-to-peer program to address limited access to care for rural veterans with chronic pain. Similar to the VHA National Pain Management Strategy, Vet-to-Vet is grounded in the significance of the social context of pain and underscores the importance of self-management.1 The program combines pain care, mutual help, and storytelling to support veterans living with chronic pain. While the primary focus of Vet-to-Vet is rural veterans, the program serves any veteran experiencing chronic pain who is isolated from services, including home-bound urban veterans.
Following mutual help principles, Vet-to-Vet peer facilitators lead weekly online drop-in meetings. Meetings follow the general structure of reiterating group ground rules and sharing an individual pain story, followed by open discussions centered on well-being, chronic pain management, or any topic the group wishes to discuss. Meetings typically end with a mindfulness exercise. The organizational structure that supports Vet-to-Vet includes the implementation support team, site leads, Vet-to-Vet peer facilitators, and national partners (Figure 1).
Implementation Support Team
The implementation support team consists of a principal investigator, coinvestigator, program manager, and program support specialist. The team provides facilitator training, monthly community practice sessions for Vet-to-Vet peer facilitators and site leads, and weekly office hours for site leads. The implementation support team also recruits new Vet-to-Vet sites; potential new locations ideally have an existing whole health program, leadership support, committed site and cosite leads, and ≥ 3 peer facilitator volunteers.
Site Leads
Most site and cosite leads are based in whole health or pain management teams and are whole health coaches or peer support specialists. The site lead is responsible for standing up the program and documenting encounters, recruiting and supporting peer facilitators and participants, and overseeing the meeting. During meetings, site leads generally leave their cameras off and only speak when called into the group; the peer facilitators lead the meetings. The implementation support team recommends that site leads dedicate ≥ 4 hours per week to Vet-to-Vet; 2 hours for weekly group meetings and 2 hours for documentation (ie, entering notes into the participants’ electronic health records) and supporting peer facilitators and participants. Cosite lead responsibilities vary by location, with some sites having 2 leads that equally share duties and others having a primary lead and a colead available if the site lead is unable to attend a meeting.
Vet-to-Vet Peer Facilitators
Peer facilitators are the core of the program. They lead meetings from start to finish. Like participants, they also experience chronic pain and are volunteers. The implementation support team encourages sites to establish volunteer peer facilitators, rather than assigning peer support specialists to facilitate meetings. Veterans are eager to connect and give back to their communities, and the Vet-to-Vet peer facilitator role is an opportunity for those unable to work to connect with peers and add meaning to their lives. Even if a VHA employee is a veteran who has chronic pain, they are not eligible to serve as this could create a service provider/service recipient dynamic that is not in the spirit of mutual help.
Vet-to-Vet peer facilitators attend a virtual 3-day training held by the implementation support team prior to starting. These training sessions are available on a quarterly basis and facilitated by the Vet-to-Vet program manager and 2 current peer facilitators. Training content includes established whole health facilitator training materials and program-specific storytelling training materials. Once trained, peer facilitators attend storytelling practice sessions and collaborate with their site leads during weekly meetings.
Participants
Vet-to-Vet participants find the program through direct outreach from site leads, word of mouth, and referrals. The only criteria to join are that the individual is a veteran who experiences chronic pain and is enrolled in the VHA (site leads can assist with enrollment if needed). Participants are not required to have a diagnosis or engage in any other health care. There is no commitment and no end date. Some participants only come once; others have attended for > 3 years. This approach is intended to embrace the idea that the need for support ebbs and flows.
National Partners
The VHA Office of Rural Health provides technical support. The Center for Development and Civic Engagement onboards peer facilitators as VHA volunteers. The Office of Patient-Centered Care and Cultural Transformation provides national guidance and site-level collaboration. The VHA Pain Management, Opioid Safety, and Prescription Drug Monitoring Program supports site recruitment. In addition to the VHA partners, 4 veteran evaluation consultants who have experience with chronic pain but do not participate in Vet-to-Vet meetings provide advice on evaluation activities, such as question development and communication strategies.
Evaluation
This evaluation shares preliminary results from a pilot evaluation of the Rocky Mountain Regional VA Medical Center (RMRVAMC) Vet-to-Vet group. It is intended for program improvement, was deemed nonresearch by the Colorado Multiple Institutional Review Board, and was structured using the RE-AIM (Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance) framework.23 This evaluation focused on capturing measures related to reach and effectiveness, while a forthcoming evaluation includes elements of adoption, implementation, and maintenance.
In 2022, 16 Vet-to-Vet peer facilitators and participants completed surveys and interviews to share their experience. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded in ATLAS.ti. A priori codes were based on interview guide questions and emergent descriptive codes were used to identify specific topics which were categorized into RE-AIM domains, barriers, facilitators, what participants learned, how participants applied what they learned to their lives, and participant reported outcomes. This article contains high-level findings from the evaluation; more detailed results will be included in the ongoing evaluation.
Results
The RMRVAMC Vet-to-Vet group has met weekly since April 2022. Four Vet-to-Vet peer facilitators and 12 individuals participated in the pilot Vet-to-Vet group and evaluation. The mean age was 62 years, most were men, and half were married. Most participants lived in rural areas with a mean distance of 125 miles to the nearest VAMC. Many experienced multiple kinds of pain, with a mean 4.5 on a 10-point scale (bothered “a lot”). All participants reported that they experienced pain daily.
Participation in Vet-to-Vet meetings was high; 3 of 4 peer facilitators and 7 of 12 participants completed the first 6 months of the program. In interviews, participants described the positive impact of the program. They emphasized the importance of connecting with other veterans and helping one another, with one noting that opportunities to connect with other veterans “just drops off a lot” (peer facilitator 3) after leaving active duty.
Some participants and Vet-to-Vet peer facilitators outlined the content of the sessions (eg, learning about how pain impacts the body and one’s family relationships) and shared the skills they learned (eg, goal setting, self-advocacy) (Table). Most spoke about learning from one another and the power of sharing stories with one peer facilitator sharing how they felt that witnessing another participant’s story “really shifted how I was thinking about things and how I perceived people” (peer facilitator 1).
Participants reported several ways the program impacted their lives, such as learning that they could get help, how to get help, and how to overcome the mental aspects of chronic pain. One veteran shared profound health impacts and attributed the Vet-to-Vet program to having one of the best years of their life. Even those who did not attend many meetings spoke of it positively and stated that it should continue so others could try (Table).
From January 2022 to September 2025, > 80 veterans attended ≥ 1 meeting at RMRVAMC; 29 attended ≥ 1 meeting in the last quarter. There were > 1400 Vet-to-Vet encounters at RMRVAMC, with a mean (SD) of 14.2 (19.2) and a median of 4.5 encounters per participant. Half of the veterans attend ≥ 5 meetings, and one-third attended ≥ 10 meetings.
Since June 2023, 15 additional VHA facilities launched Vet-to-Vet programs. As of October 2025, > 350 veterans have participated in ≥ 1 Vet-to-Vet meeting, totaling > 4500 Vet-to-Vet encounters since the program’s inception (Figure 2).
Challenges
The RMRVAMC site and cosite leads are part of the national implementation team and dedicate substantial time to developing the program: 40 and 10 hours per week, respectively. Site leads at new locations do not receive funding for Vet-to-Vet activities and are recommended to dedicate only 4 hours per week to the program. Formally embedding Vet-to-Vet into the site leads’ roles is critical for sustainment.
The Vet-to-Vet model has changed. The initial Vet-to-Vet cohort included the 6-week Taking Charge of My Life and Health curriculum prior to moving to the mutual help format.24 While this curriculum still informs peer facilitator training, it is not used in new groups. It has anecdotally been reported that this change was positive, but the impact of this adaptation is unknown.
This evaluation cohort was small (16 participants) and initial patient reported and administrative outcomes were inconclusive. However, most veterans who stopped participating in Vet-to-Vet spoke fondly of their experiences with the program.
CONCLUSIONS
Vet-to-Vet is a promising new initiative to support self-management and social connection in chronic pain care. The program employs a mutual help approach and storytelling to empower veterans living with chronic pain. The effectiveness of these strategies will be evaluated, which will inform its continued growth. The program's current goals focus on sustainment at existing sites and expansion to new sites to reach more rural veterans across the VA enterprise. While Vet-to-Vet is designed to serve those who experience chronic pain, a partnership with the Office of Whole Health has established goals to begin expanding this model to other chronic conditions in 2026.
The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) has continued to advance its understanding and treatment of chronic pain. The VHA National Pain Management Strategy emphasizes the significance of the social context of pain while underscoring the importance of self-management.1 This established strategy ensures that all veterans have access to the appropriate pain care in the proper setting.2 VHA has instituted a stepped care model of pain management, delineating the domains of primary care, secondary consultative services, and tertiary care.3 This directive emphasized a biopsychosocial approach to pain management to prioritize the relationship between biological, psychological, and social factors that influence how veterans experience pain and should commensurately influence how it is managed.
The VHA Office of Patient-Centered Care and Cultural Transformation implemented the Whole Health System of Care as part of the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, which included a VHA directive to expand pain management.4,5 Reorientation within this system shifts from defining veterans as passive care recipients to viewing them as active partners in their own care and health. This partnership places additional emphasis on peer-led explorations of mission, aspiration, and purpose.6
Peer-led groups, also known as mutual aid, mutual support, and mutual help groups, have historically been successful for patients undergoing treatment for substance use disorders (eg, Alcoholics Anonymous).7 Mutual help groups have 3 defining characteristics. First, they are run by participants, not professionals, though the latter may have been integral in the founding of the groups. Second, participants share a similar problem (eg, disease state, experience, disposition). Finally, there is a reciprocal exchange of information and psychological support among participants.8,9 Mutual help groups that address chronic pain are rare but becoming more common.10-12 Emerging evidence suggests a positive relationship between peer support and improved well-being, self-efficacy, pain management, and pain self-management skills (eg, activity pacing).13-15
Storytelling as a tool for healing has a long history in indigenous and Western medical traditions.16-19 This includes the treatment of chronic disease, including pain.20,21 The use of storytelling in health care overlaps with the role it plays within many mutual help groups focused on chronic disease treatment.22 Storytelling allows an individual to share their experience with a disease, and take a more active role in their health, and facilitate stronger bonds with others.22 In effect, storytelling is not only important to group cohesion—it also plays a role in an individual’s healing.
Vet-to-Vet
The VHA Office of Rural Health funds Vet-to-Vet, a peer-to-peer program to address limited access to care for rural veterans with chronic pain. Similar to the VHA National Pain Management Strategy, Vet-to-Vet is grounded in the significance of the social context of pain and underscores the importance of self-management.1 The program combines pain care, mutual help, and storytelling to support veterans living with chronic pain. While the primary focus of Vet-to-Vet is rural veterans, the program serves any veteran experiencing chronic pain who is isolated from services, including home-bound urban veterans.
Following mutual help principles, Vet-to-Vet peer facilitators lead weekly online drop-in meetings. Meetings follow the general structure of reiterating group ground rules and sharing an individual pain story, followed by open discussions centered on well-being, chronic pain management, or any topic the group wishes to discuss. Meetings typically end with a mindfulness exercise. The organizational structure that supports Vet-to-Vet includes the implementation support team, site leads, Vet-to-Vet peer facilitators, and national partners (Figure 1).
Implementation Support Team
The implementation support team consists of a principal investigator, coinvestigator, program manager, and program support specialist. The team provides facilitator training, monthly community practice sessions for Vet-to-Vet peer facilitators and site leads, and weekly office hours for site leads. The implementation support team also recruits new Vet-to-Vet sites; potential new locations ideally have an existing whole health program, leadership support, committed site and cosite leads, and ≥ 3 peer facilitator volunteers.
Site Leads
Most site and cosite leads are based in whole health or pain management teams and are whole health coaches or peer support specialists. The site lead is responsible for standing up the program and documenting encounters, recruiting and supporting peer facilitators and participants, and overseeing the meeting. During meetings, site leads generally leave their cameras off and only speak when called into the group; the peer facilitators lead the meetings. The implementation support team recommends that site leads dedicate ≥ 4 hours per week to Vet-to-Vet; 2 hours for weekly group meetings and 2 hours for documentation (ie, entering notes into the participants’ electronic health records) and supporting peer facilitators and participants. Cosite lead responsibilities vary by location, with some sites having 2 leads that equally share duties and others having a primary lead and a colead available if the site lead is unable to attend a meeting.
Vet-to-Vet Peer Facilitators
Peer facilitators are the core of the program. They lead meetings from start to finish. Like participants, they also experience chronic pain and are volunteers. The implementation support team encourages sites to establish volunteer peer facilitators, rather than assigning peer support specialists to facilitate meetings. Veterans are eager to connect and give back to their communities, and the Vet-to-Vet peer facilitator role is an opportunity for those unable to work to connect with peers and add meaning to their lives. Even if a VHA employee is a veteran who has chronic pain, they are not eligible to serve as this could create a service provider/service recipient dynamic that is not in the spirit of mutual help.
Vet-to-Vet peer facilitators attend a virtual 3-day training held by the implementation support team prior to starting. These training sessions are available on a quarterly basis and facilitated by the Vet-to-Vet program manager and 2 current peer facilitators. Training content includes established whole health facilitator training materials and program-specific storytelling training materials. Once trained, peer facilitators attend storytelling practice sessions and collaborate with their site leads during weekly meetings.
Participants
Vet-to-Vet participants find the program through direct outreach from site leads, word of mouth, and referrals. The only criteria to join are that the individual is a veteran who experiences chronic pain and is enrolled in the VHA (site leads can assist with enrollment if needed). Participants are not required to have a diagnosis or engage in any other health care. There is no commitment and no end date. Some participants only come once; others have attended for > 3 years. This approach is intended to embrace the idea that the need for support ebbs and flows.
National Partners
The VHA Office of Rural Health provides technical support. The Center for Development and Civic Engagement onboards peer facilitators as VHA volunteers. The Office of Patient-Centered Care and Cultural Transformation provides national guidance and site-level collaboration. The VHA Pain Management, Opioid Safety, and Prescription Drug Monitoring Program supports site recruitment. In addition to the VHA partners, 4 veteran evaluation consultants who have experience with chronic pain but do not participate in Vet-to-Vet meetings provide advice on evaluation activities, such as question development and communication strategies.
Evaluation
This evaluation shares preliminary results from a pilot evaluation of the Rocky Mountain Regional VA Medical Center (RMRVAMC) Vet-to-Vet group. It is intended for program improvement, was deemed nonresearch by the Colorado Multiple Institutional Review Board, and was structured using the RE-AIM (Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance) framework.23 This evaluation focused on capturing measures related to reach and effectiveness, while a forthcoming evaluation includes elements of adoption, implementation, and maintenance.
In 2022, 16 Vet-to-Vet peer facilitators and participants completed surveys and interviews to share their experience. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded in ATLAS.ti. A priori codes were based on interview guide questions and emergent descriptive codes were used to identify specific topics which were categorized into RE-AIM domains, barriers, facilitators, what participants learned, how participants applied what they learned to their lives, and participant reported outcomes. This article contains high-level findings from the evaluation; more detailed results will be included in the ongoing evaluation.
Results
The RMRVAMC Vet-to-Vet group has met weekly since April 2022. Four Vet-to-Vet peer facilitators and 12 individuals participated in the pilot Vet-to-Vet group and evaluation. The mean age was 62 years, most were men, and half were married. Most participants lived in rural areas with a mean distance of 125 miles to the nearest VAMC. Many experienced multiple kinds of pain, with a mean 4.5 on a 10-point scale (bothered “a lot”). All participants reported that they experienced pain daily.
Participation in Vet-to-Vet meetings was high; 3 of 4 peer facilitators and 7 of 12 participants completed the first 6 months of the program. In interviews, participants described the positive impact of the program. They emphasized the importance of connecting with other veterans and helping one another, with one noting that opportunities to connect with other veterans “just drops off a lot” (peer facilitator 3) after leaving active duty.
Some participants and Vet-to-Vet peer facilitators outlined the content of the sessions (eg, learning about how pain impacts the body and one’s family relationships) and shared the skills they learned (eg, goal setting, self-advocacy) (Table). Most spoke about learning from one another and the power of sharing stories with one peer facilitator sharing how they felt that witnessing another participant’s story “really shifted how I was thinking about things and how I perceived people” (peer facilitator 1).
Participants reported several ways the program impacted their lives, such as learning that they could get help, how to get help, and how to overcome the mental aspects of chronic pain. One veteran shared profound health impacts and attributed the Vet-to-Vet program to having one of the best years of their life. Even those who did not attend many meetings spoke of it positively and stated that it should continue so others could try (Table).
From January 2022 to September 2025, > 80 veterans attended ≥ 1 meeting at RMRVAMC; 29 attended ≥ 1 meeting in the last quarter. There were > 1400 Vet-to-Vet encounters at RMRVAMC, with a mean (SD) of 14.2 (19.2) and a median of 4.5 encounters per participant. Half of the veterans attend ≥ 5 meetings, and one-third attended ≥ 10 meetings.
Since June 2023, 15 additional VHA facilities launched Vet-to-Vet programs. As of October 2025, > 350 veterans have participated in ≥ 1 Vet-to-Vet meeting, totaling > 4500 Vet-to-Vet encounters since the program’s inception (Figure 2).
Challenges
The RMRVAMC site and cosite leads are part of the national implementation team and dedicate substantial time to developing the program: 40 and 10 hours per week, respectively. Site leads at new locations do not receive funding for Vet-to-Vet activities and are recommended to dedicate only 4 hours per week to the program. Formally embedding Vet-to-Vet into the site leads’ roles is critical for sustainment.
The Vet-to-Vet model has changed. The initial Vet-to-Vet cohort included the 6-week Taking Charge of My Life and Health curriculum prior to moving to the mutual help format.24 While this curriculum still informs peer facilitator training, it is not used in new groups. It has anecdotally been reported that this change was positive, but the impact of this adaptation is unknown.
This evaluation cohort was small (16 participants) and initial patient reported and administrative outcomes were inconclusive. However, most veterans who stopped participating in Vet-to-Vet spoke fondly of their experiences with the program.
CONCLUSIONS
Vet-to-Vet is a promising new initiative to support self-management and social connection in chronic pain care. The program employs a mutual help approach and storytelling to empower veterans living with chronic pain. The effectiveness of these strategies will be evaluated, which will inform its continued growth. The program's current goals focus on sustainment at existing sites and expansion to new sites to reach more rural veterans across the VA enterprise. While Vet-to-Vet is designed to serve those who experience chronic pain, a partnership with the Office of Whole Health has established goals to begin expanding this model to other chronic conditions in 2026.
- Kerns RD, Philip EJ, Lee AW, Rosenberger PH. Implementation of the Veterans Health Administration national pain management strategy. Transl Behav Med. 2011;1:635-643. doi:10.1007/s13142-011-0094-3
- Pain Management, Opioid Safety, and PDMP (PMOP). US Department of Veterans Affairs. Updated August 21, 2025. Accessed September 25, 2025. https://www.va.gov/PAINMANAGEMENT/Providers/IntegratedTeambasedPainCare.asp
- US Department of Veterans Affairs. VHA Directive 2009-053. October 28, 2009. Accessed September 25, 2025. https://www.va.gov/PAINMANAGEMENT/docs/VHA09PainDirective.pdf
- Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2016, S524, 114th Cong (2015-2016). Pub L No. 114-198. July 22, 2016. Accessed September 25, 2025. https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/524
- Bokhour B, Hyde J, Zeliadt, Mohr D. Whole Health System of Care Evaluation. US Department of Veterans Affairs. February 18, 2020. Accessed September 25, 2025. https://www.va.gov/WHOLEHEALTH/docs/EPCC_WHSevaluation_FinalReport_508.pdf
- Gaudet T, Kligler B. Whole health in the whole system of the veterans administration: how will we know we have reached this future state? J Altern Complement Med. 2019;25:S7-S11. doi:10.1089/acm.2018.29061.gau
- Kelly JF, Yeterian JD. The role of mutual-help groups in extending the framework of treatment. Alcohol Res Health. 2011;33:350-355.
- Humphreys K. Self-help/mutual aid organizations: the view from Mars. Subst Use Misuse. 1997;32:2105-2109. doi:10.3109/10826089709035622
- Chinman M, Kloos B, O’Connell M, Davidson L. Service providers’ views of psychiatric mutual support groups. J Community Psychol. 2002;30:349-366. doi:10.1002/jcop.10010
- Shue SA, McGuire AB, Matthias MS. Facilitators and barriers to implementation of a peer support intervention for patients with chronic pain: a qualitative study. Pain Med. 2019;20:1311-1320. doi:10.1093/pm/pny229
- Pester BD, Tankha H, Caño A, et al. Facing pain together: a randomized controlled trial of the effects of Facebook support groups on adults with chronic pain. J Pain. 2022;23:2121-2134. doi:10.1016/j.jpain.2022.07.013
- Matthias MS, McGuire AB, Kukla M, Daggy J, Myers LJ, Bair MJ. A brief peer support intervention for veterans with chronic musculoskeletal pain: a pilot study of feasibility and effectiveness. Pain Med. 2015;16:81-87. doi:10.1111/pme.12571
- Finlay KA, Elander J. Reflecting the transition from pain management services to chronic pain support group attendance: an interpretative phenomenological analysis. Br J Health Psychol. 2016;21:660-676. doi:10.1111/bjhp.12194
- Finlay KA, Peacock S, Elander J. Developing successful social support: an interpretative phenomenological analysis of mechanisms and processes in a chronic pain support group. Psychol Health. 2018;33:846-871. doi:10.1080/08870446.2017.1421188
- Farr M, Brant H, Patel R, et al. Experiences of patient-led chronic pain peer support groups after pain management programs: a qualitative study. Pain Med. 2021;22:2884-2895. doi:10.1093/pm/pnab189
- Mehl-Madrona L. Narrative Medicine: The Use of History and Story in the Healing Process. Bear & Company; 2007.
- Fioretti C, Mazzocco K, Riva S, Oliveri S, Masiero M, Pravettoni G. Research studies on patients’ illness experience using the Narrative Medicine approach: a systematic review. BMJ Open. 2016;6:e011220. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2016-011220
- Hall JM, Powell J. Understanding the person through narrative. Nurs Res Pract. 2011;2011:293837. doi:10.1155/2011/293837
- Ricks L, Kitchens S, Goodrich T, Hancock E. My story: the use of narrative therapy in individual and group counseling. J Creat Ment Health. 2014;9:99-110. doi:10.1080/15401383.2013.870947
- Hydén L-C. Illness and narrative. Sociol Health Illn. 1997;19:48-69. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9566.1997.tb00015.x
- Georgiadis E, Johnson MI. Incorporating personal narratives in positive psychology interventions to manage chronic pain. Front Pain Res (Lausanne). 2023;4:1253310. doi:10.3389/fpain.2023.1253310
- Gucciardi E, Jean-Pierre N, Karam G, Sidani S. Designing and delivering facilitated storytelling interventions for chronic disease self-management: a scoping review. BMC Health Serv Res. 2016;16:249. doi:10.1186/s12913-016-1474-7
- Glasgow RE, Vogt TM, Boles SM. Evaluating the public health impact of health promotion interventions: the RE-AIM framework. Am J Public Health. 1999;89:1322-1327. doi:10.2105/ajph.89.9.1322
- Abadi M, Richard B, Shamblen S, et al. Achieving whole health: a preliminary study of TCMLH, a group-based program promoting self-care and empowerment among veterans. Health Educ Behav. 2022;49:347-357. doi:10.1177/10901981211011043
- Kerns RD, Philip EJ, Lee AW, Rosenberger PH. Implementation of the Veterans Health Administration national pain management strategy. Transl Behav Med. 2011;1:635-643. doi:10.1007/s13142-011-0094-3
- Pain Management, Opioid Safety, and PDMP (PMOP). US Department of Veterans Affairs. Updated August 21, 2025. Accessed September 25, 2025. https://www.va.gov/PAINMANAGEMENT/Providers/IntegratedTeambasedPainCare.asp
- US Department of Veterans Affairs. VHA Directive 2009-053. October 28, 2009. Accessed September 25, 2025. https://www.va.gov/PAINMANAGEMENT/docs/VHA09PainDirective.pdf
- Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2016, S524, 114th Cong (2015-2016). Pub L No. 114-198. July 22, 2016. Accessed September 25, 2025. https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/524
- Bokhour B, Hyde J, Zeliadt, Mohr D. Whole Health System of Care Evaluation. US Department of Veterans Affairs. February 18, 2020. Accessed September 25, 2025. https://www.va.gov/WHOLEHEALTH/docs/EPCC_WHSevaluation_FinalReport_508.pdf
- Gaudet T, Kligler B. Whole health in the whole system of the veterans administration: how will we know we have reached this future state? J Altern Complement Med. 2019;25:S7-S11. doi:10.1089/acm.2018.29061.gau
- Kelly JF, Yeterian JD. The role of mutual-help groups in extending the framework of treatment. Alcohol Res Health. 2011;33:350-355.
- Humphreys K. Self-help/mutual aid organizations: the view from Mars. Subst Use Misuse. 1997;32:2105-2109. doi:10.3109/10826089709035622
- Chinman M, Kloos B, O’Connell M, Davidson L. Service providers’ views of psychiatric mutual support groups. J Community Psychol. 2002;30:349-366. doi:10.1002/jcop.10010
- Shue SA, McGuire AB, Matthias MS. Facilitators and barriers to implementation of a peer support intervention for patients with chronic pain: a qualitative study. Pain Med. 2019;20:1311-1320. doi:10.1093/pm/pny229
- Pester BD, Tankha H, Caño A, et al. Facing pain together: a randomized controlled trial of the effects of Facebook support groups on adults with chronic pain. J Pain. 2022;23:2121-2134. doi:10.1016/j.jpain.2022.07.013
- Matthias MS, McGuire AB, Kukla M, Daggy J, Myers LJ, Bair MJ. A brief peer support intervention for veterans with chronic musculoskeletal pain: a pilot study of feasibility and effectiveness. Pain Med. 2015;16:81-87. doi:10.1111/pme.12571
- Finlay KA, Elander J. Reflecting the transition from pain management services to chronic pain support group attendance: an interpretative phenomenological analysis. Br J Health Psychol. 2016;21:660-676. doi:10.1111/bjhp.12194
- Finlay KA, Peacock S, Elander J. Developing successful social support: an interpretative phenomenological analysis of mechanisms and processes in a chronic pain support group. Psychol Health. 2018;33:846-871. doi:10.1080/08870446.2017.1421188
- Farr M, Brant H, Patel R, et al. Experiences of patient-led chronic pain peer support groups after pain management programs: a qualitative study. Pain Med. 2021;22:2884-2895. doi:10.1093/pm/pnab189
- Mehl-Madrona L. Narrative Medicine: The Use of History and Story in the Healing Process. Bear & Company; 2007.
- Fioretti C, Mazzocco K, Riva S, Oliveri S, Masiero M, Pravettoni G. Research studies on patients’ illness experience using the Narrative Medicine approach: a systematic review. BMJ Open. 2016;6:e011220. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2016-011220
- Hall JM, Powell J. Understanding the person through narrative. Nurs Res Pract. 2011;2011:293837. doi:10.1155/2011/293837
- Ricks L, Kitchens S, Goodrich T, Hancock E. My story: the use of narrative therapy in individual and group counseling. J Creat Ment Health. 2014;9:99-110. doi:10.1080/15401383.2013.870947
- Hydén L-C. Illness and narrative. Sociol Health Illn. 1997;19:48-69. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9566.1997.tb00015.x
- Georgiadis E, Johnson MI. Incorporating personal narratives in positive psychology interventions to manage chronic pain. Front Pain Res (Lausanne). 2023;4:1253310. doi:10.3389/fpain.2023.1253310
- Gucciardi E, Jean-Pierre N, Karam G, Sidani S. Designing and delivering facilitated storytelling interventions for chronic disease self-management: a scoping review. BMC Health Serv Res. 2016;16:249. doi:10.1186/s12913-016-1474-7
- Glasgow RE, Vogt TM, Boles SM. Evaluating the public health impact of health promotion interventions: the RE-AIM framework. Am J Public Health. 1999;89:1322-1327. doi:10.2105/ajph.89.9.1322
- Abadi M, Richard B, Shamblen S, et al. Achieving whole health: a preliminary study of TCMLH, a group-based program promoting self-care and empowerment among veterans. Health Educ Behav. 2022;49:347-357. doi:10.1177/10901981211011043
A True Community: The Vet-to-Vet Program for Chronic Pain
A True Community: The Vet-to-Vet Program for Chronic Pain
Perspective on Opioid Prescribing
Pain is a frequent symptom among patients seen in the hospital.[1, 2, 3] Hospitalized patients often suffer before they come to the hospital and are commonly prescribed opioids in the months preceding their hospital stay.[4] Adequate pain control is important because uncontrolled pain is associated with higher levels of depression and anxiety among hospitalized patients.[5] In 2011, the Institute of Medicine called on healthcare providers to improve pain assessment and management in healthcare delivery.[6] Since then, pain management has become a key quality indicator for hospitals, and providers are encouraged to frequently assess and treat pain.[7, 8, 9, 10] Although the use of opioids for pain management among hospitalized patients is routine, the amount of opioids prescribed per patient varies widely between institutions.[11] In‐hospital guidelines for the optimal management of acute exacerbations of chronic pain are lacking.
Pain management also carries risks. Recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged clinicians to prevent opioid overdoses by following best prescribing practices including screening patients for substance use disorders, mental health issues, and avoiding combinations of opioids and sedatives.[12, 13] These guidelines may be at odds with the priorities of current hospital care, which focus on patient‐perceived pain control rather than potential long‐term consequences of opioid use.[7, 8, 14] In light of the competing demands to provide adequate pain relief to hospitalized patients while optimally prescribing opioids, we sought to understand physicians' attitudes, beliefs, and experiences that inform opioid prescribing practices during hospitalization and at discharge.
METHODS
Study Design, Setting, and Participants
Between January 2015 and August 2015, we recruited a convenience sample via e‐mail solicitation from approximately 135 hospitalists practicing in Colorado and South Carolina.[15] Fifty‐three physicians responded. We conducted 25 in‐depth, semistructured interviews with physicians who represented the average hospitalist practicing in the United States in terms of years in practice and gender.[16] We enrolled physicians working in 4 distinct types of hospital settings, including 2 university hospitals, a safety‐net hospital, a Veterans Affairs hospital, and a private hospital. We used purposive sampling to achieve an even distribution with respect to gender and years in practice.[17] Interviews were either face‐to‐face (n = 16) or over the telephone (n = 9) and were performed outside of the physician's clinical shift. Informed consent was obtained from study participants, and the interview duration was approximately 1 hour. The study was approved by the Colorado Multiple Institutional Review Board.
Interview Guide Development and Content
Members of our multidisciplinary team (S.L.C., I.A.B., S.K.) developed an interview guide designed to explore hospitalists' attitudes and practices about opioid prescribing during hospitalization and at discharge (see Supporting Information, Appendix 1, in the online version of this article). Initial interview questions were developed with input from health sciences researchers (S.E.L., A.D.D., R.D.) and qualitative researchers (I.A.B., S.K.). During data collection, we occasionally edited or added questions to our guide to more fully explore new issues or information emerging from our interviews. Through open‐ended interviews, we sought to capture a qualitative narrative in which hospitalists would describe their attitudes and practices that may influence opioid prescribing within 3 major domains pertinent to clinical practice: patient factors,[18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23] physician factors,[24, 25, 26, 27] and institutional factors.[27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32] These domains were based on prior literature. All participants received a $25 gift card.
Data Analysis
Interview transcripts and a demographic survey were our primary data sources. Transcript files were entered into qualitative data analysis software (ATLAS.ti; Scientific Software Development GmbH, Berlin, Germany). We used a mixed inductive and deductive,[33] participatory, team‐based approach to explore patterns and themes related to attitudes and practices around opioid prescribing.[34, 35] A deductive or top‐down approach was used to link text to predefined codes and categories based on literature, prior knowledge, and our interview guide. An inductive or bottom‐up approach was used to identify new codes and categories that emerged from the data, including unanticipated information relevant to our research questions.
Team members included 2 hospitalists (S.L.C., A.D.D.), 2 research assistants with experience in qualitative methods (S.E.L., R.D.), an addiction medicine physician and researcher (I.A.B.), and a medical anthropologist (S.K.). S.L.C. performed initial coding using an a priori template that reflected the primary areas of interest in the study. The codes were categorized as patient, physician, and institutional factors. Using this template as a guide, 3 other team members (S.E.L., A.D.D., R.D.) independently coded 3 transcripts by assigning predefined codes to text and assigning new codes to emergent findings. Using this subset of 4 transcripts, the team reached a consensus on initial codes to be applied to the remaining transcripts. In weekly meetings, team members discussed and modified the codebook based on inconsistencies noted among team members to refine the coding scheme and to ensure consensus. Through group consensus, codes were condensed into a list of categories, subcategories, and emergent themes (ie, themes that did not originate from summarized answers to specific interview questions). The team identified emergent themes represented across all major domains (Table 1). Three of the most prevalent themes representing physicians' personal opioid prescribing practices are reported here. The study team determined that thematic saturation was reached after 25 interviews, as additional interview data created little change to the codebook and no new patterns or themes emerged.
|
| Perceived success, satisfaction, comfort, and the use of opioids for pain management* |
| Professional experiences influenced opioid prescribing practices* |
| The use of opioids to improve efficiency* |
| Skepticism between other physician subspecialty types and opioid prescribing practices |
| Unintended consequences of patient‐perceived pain control metrics and opioid prescribing |
| Lack of trust with patients when reported pain level was not supported with objective data |
| Resident burnout contributed to a lack of empathy and undertreatment of pain |
| Limited perceived risk of personal opioid prescribing practices and patient overdose with short‐acting opioids |
| Unreal expectations by patients to have complete pain eradication contributes to overprescribing |
| Recognition that patient profiling impacts personal opioid‐prescribing practices |
RESULTS
Of the 25 hospitalist participants who were all trained in internal medicine, 16 (64%) were women. The majority were non‐Hispanic white (21 [84%]). Nine physicians (36%) completed residency within the past 5 years, 12 (48%) completed residency within the past 5 to 10 years, and 4 (16%) completed residency >10 years ago. Sixteen (64%) hospitalists practiced medicine in Colorado, where 8 (32%) worked in a safety‐net hospital, 5 (20%) worked in a university hospital, and 3 (12%) worked in a Veterans Affairs hospital. Nine hospitalists (36%) practiced in South Carolina, where 2 (8%) worked in a university hospital and 7 (28%) worked in a private hospital (Table 2).
| Female, no. (%) | 16 (64) |
| Race/ethnicity, no. (%) | |
| White, non‐Hispanic | 21 (84) |
| Asian, non‐Hispanic | 4 (16) |
| Years postresidency, no. (%) | |
| 5 | 9 (36) |
| 510 | 12 (48) |
| >10 | 4 (16) |
| State of practice, no. (%) | |
| Colorado | 16 (64) |
| South Carolina | 9 (36) |
| Private hospital, no. (%) | 7 (28) |
| Academic institution, no. (%) | |
| Safety‐net hospital | 8 (32) |
| Veteran Affairs hospital | 3 (12) |
| University hospital | 7 (28) |
Emergent themes described here include: (1) hospitalists' perceived success, satisfaction, and comfort when prescribing opioids for their patients' pain management; (2) the influence of physicians' professional sentinel experiences on opioid prescribing practices; and (3) opioid prescribing as a tool to improve efficiency in the hospital. Additional quotations to support emergent themes are listed in Table 3.
| Theme | Illustrative Quote |
|---|---|
| |
| Perceived success, satisfaction, comfort, and the use of opioids for pain management | Acute pain: I'm more comfortable treating acute pain. With chronic pain, it depends on the circumstance. There are certain people who have objective reasons to have chronic pain, for instance they have severe degenerate disc disease, for example. With chronic painlet me just say, getting their pain under control is quite challenging. Acute pain is much more straight forward to treat. |
| Chronic pain; If I am treating an exacerbation of someone's chronic pain, it makes me a little less comfortable as far as sending people out on large doses of opioids because of the whole addiction thought behind it. And you don't want to start or feed people's addiction. Or, you know, lead them to it, in the future, requiring increased doses of opioids. | |
| Chronic pain: I have a hard time feeling like I'm very successful with people who have chronic noncancer pain who come in for an exacerbation. Unless I can figure out clear reasons for that exacerbation, I feel I rarely succeed in having the patient, the providers, and the caregivers be happy. It is an unrewarding situation all around. | |
| Chronic pain: I'm less comfortable treating chronic pain because we don't know the patients as well, I think, in the hospital, and you just worry about people abusing the system to get their needs met while they are in the hospital. We don't have much objective data in terms of assessing pain, and you know, they are on chronic narcotics, you don't really know what to believe, I guess. | |
| Professional experiences that influenced opioid prescribing practices | In the hospital: I had 1 horrible experience. I had a young woman who came in with chronic abdominal pain. She told me how much opioids she took. It was before there was a statewide database and I couldn't verify her doses. I gave her what she told me she was taking. I hadn't put a pulse ox on her which I always do now because it makes me feel better. Later the nurse called and said she wasn't responsive. I put her on Pulse Ox and she was sating 30% and blue. A code was called and we brought her back. That was in my mind for ever, I almost killed a 23 year old. |
| In the hospital: I think past experiences inform what I do now. I mean it's not that I've murdered anybody, but there was a time when I took over a patient and didn't realize that, while she had terrible pain from her restless leg syndrome, she also had severe pulmonary hypertension. I gave her 5 mg of oxycodone. She ended up somnolent with hypercarbic respiratory failure. I think that is something that will always stick in my head. | |
| Discharge: When discussing what type of opioids prescribed at dischargeI worry about, not just deliberate diversion, but for the patient being robbed, for the type of opioid I might choose. So I might do oxycodone instead of Percocet. Percocet, itself, has a higher street value then oxycodone. That may be completely false, but I think of it as a name brand that people want. | |
| Discharge: I think many providers, including myself, try to minimize the use of opiates when we can. I think we are all concerned every time we write, you know, our DEA #. Even when we have other providers ask us, you know, to prescribe opioids for their patients because they are out of the hospital or something like that, it is always a touchy subject. Because I think we all feel like our license is always at risk every time we are writing opioids. | |
| Discharge: I give them what they need but I want them to be seen in follow‐up. I encourage that by giving them a shortened course. I'm more skeptical. I've seen people misuse, have bad side effects, and overdose on opioids. I worry about that, so I tend to prescribe shorter courses and less. | |
| The use of opioids to improve efficiency | There is always the group of patients [for whom] we've done everything we can. We set up follow‐up. If giving you a few days of Percocet is going to help you leave the hospital comfortably and stay out of the hospital for appropriate reasons, then we give them a few days. It's horrible but... |
| I'll give 4 or 6 weeks' worth of opioid medication to the chronic abdominal pain patients, the ones who have ERCPs scheduled for every 4 or 6 weeks. You sort of end up managing their chronic pain. It's the people that we know. If you don't give them a month's worth of pain meds, they are going to come back in to the hospital. Because they always come in when they run out. | |
| I think physicians overprescribe opioids because we don't want people to bounce back to the hospital. We don't want them to have acute pain at home and have to go back to the ER to be readmitted. You don't want someone to be in pain. I think that sometimes people go overboard. I also think that sometimes physicians gauge like, oh, this person isn't a huge risk, and maybe give them more opioids than necessary. | |
Perceived Success, Satisfaction, and Comfort When Prescribing Opioids for Pain Management
Providing adequate pain control to their patients was of utmost importance to hospitalists and influenced opioid prescribing. Hospitalists felt confident in their ability to control acute pain using opioids, but notably perceived limited success in achieving adequate patient‐perceived pain control when treating acute exacerbations of chronic pain with opioids. A physician described his confidence in treating severe, acute pain:
If someone is dying of cancer, or if they have an acutely broken femur, I don't really care if they are actively in the 12‐Step Program or Narcotics Anonymous to stay sober. That pain is real and there is no effective pain medicine on earth except for opioids.
[I am uncomfortable treating] people that you classify with chronic pain syndrome. There is that terminology you use for people who have subjective pain, out of proportion to objective findings. In my experience it is a black hole. You never get an adequate level of pain control and you keep adding the doses up and they get habituated. An end point is very difficult to achieve. Not like with acute pain.
All of these things you do for patient satisfaction set up people, who aren't ever going to be without pain, to fail. They have pain all the time, and now you are asking them about their pain. Well, of course their pain is not controlled, because their pain is never going to be less than 5 out of 10, period. And no opioid is going to get them there, unless they are unconscious.
Professional Experiences Influenced Opioid Prescribing Practices
Physicians reported little opioid‐specific training during residency, and so opioid prescribing practices were shaped by the physicians' clinical experiences. Hospitalists reflected on negative, sentinel events that shaped their opioid prescribing practices in the inpatient setting or led them to adopt risk‐modifying behaviors when prescribing opioids at hospital discharge. Negative experiences varied and included a fatal overdose and suspected diversion of opioids for sale. A physician reflected on an avoidable in‐hospital overdose which left her more guarded when prescribing opioids:
It is both your cumulative experience and, sometimes, when you've had a negative experience, it really biases how you think. I've had an experience where my patient actually overdosed. She crushed up the oxycodone we were giving her in the hospital and shot it up through her central line and died. We've all had experiences with opioids being abused. This just happened to be a very dramatic thing that happened right under my nose. It just makes me more guarded, in terms of my practice, and the lengths people will go through to do harm to themselves with opioids.
Hospitalists recognized that some of their patients had limited resources. They expressed suspicions that opioid prescriptions, in some cases, represented a form of currency for patients to supplement their income. A physician stated:
I think our population can divert quite a few meds. I think their financial situations can be really tenuous. Sometimes they sell pills to survive.
Physicians described past experiences with patients who were deceptive to get an opioid prescription, which left them much more reticent to prescribe the drugs. For example, a physician described how a patient altered her opioid prescription following hospital discharge:
I saw a patient who had her gallbladder removed. She asked for an opioid script until she could see her primary care physician, so I gave her a few days of opioids. I later found out she had forged my script and had changed it from 18 pills to 180 pills. She took it all over the state to try to fill. I got a call from the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] and had to write them a letter. I think she's in prison now.
These experiences inspired hospitalists to adopt strategies around opioid prescribing that would make it harder for a patient to misuse a prescription or to jeopardize their DEA license. A physician discussed her technique to prevent patients from selling their opioid prescriptions following discharge:
When I write the prescription, I put the name of the patient on the paper prescription with the patient's sticker on top. I don't want the patients to pull it off and sell the prescription, especially when it is my license.
Another physician described feeling reassured when she is able to verify a patient's opioid dose in a statewide prescription monitoring program:
Seeing they have filled opioids before supports your decision making. You just sort of cross your finger that this time my DEA number is not going to come up on the next drug bust!
The Use of Opioids to Improve Institutional Efficiency
Hospitalists felt institutional pressure to reduce hospital readmissions and to facilitate discharges. Pain was a common complaint among patients admitted to the hospital, and uncontrolled pain often prolonged a hospital stay. In these ways, physicians viewed opioid prescriptions as a tool to buffer against readmission or long hospital stays. A physician described his approach to more readily prescribed opioids when he felt it would prevent a patient from being rehospitalized:
If a patient tells you that they are in pain and they are receiving opioids in the hospital, and I have a strong sense that this is a person who comes back to the hospital easily and regularly if something is not right, I'm more likely to make sure that patient has adequate pain medicine for a reasonable duration of time to reduce the chance that they get readmitted just for pain alone.
Physicians used opioids as a tool to facilitate discharges and prevent readmissions; yet doing so sometimes left them feeling conflicted. On one hand, they felt pressured to maintain efficiency; on the other hand, they recognized it might not be in the patient's best interest to receive a higher than necessary quantity of opioids at discharge. A physician described his dilemma:
For the acute pain, I usually give them 15 to 20 [opioid pills]. For the chronics, maybe a little bit more like 30. A lot of them have told me they can just buy it off the street anyway. If we can help keep them out of the hospital, we are probably doing them a disservice [by prescribing more opioids], but we are also not clogging up our system.
Similarly, another hospitalist described opioid prescribing at discharge as a way to reduce hospital costs and prevent a readmission, despite feeling uncomfortable when a patient's diagnosis of pain was nebulous:
If the patient comes back and gets readmitted to the hospital when they don't have pain medicine, it's a $3,000.00, 2‐day stay in the hospital that was unnecessary. And when they have a prescription for a month of pain medicine, they stay out of the hospital. That is utterly pragmaticthere is no other way to do it and it's going to work. At other times, especially when a patient lacks a diagnosis which is known to cause pain, it can feel cheap and dirty.
DISCUSSION
To our knowledge, this is the first study to qualitatively explore the hospitalist perspective on opioid prescribing during hospitalization and at discharge. Hospitalists expressed discomfort and dissatisfaction when managing acute exacerbations of chronic pain with opioid medications. This stemmed from the discordance between the patients' expressed pain and the lack of objective clinical findings of pain, a perceived inability to adequately provide relief to patients with chronic pain, and a concern of contributing to future opioid dependence. Hospitalists identified negative professional experiences with opioid prescribing as a factor that influenced their opioid prescribing practices. Hospitalists also described using opioids as a tool to reduce readmissions and facilitate hospital discharges to contain healthcare costs. This sometimes left them feeling conflicted, especially when their patients lacked clear, pain‐related diagnoses.
Hospitalists were reluctant to increase patients' chronic opioid therapy doses, even when patients had acute exacerbations of chronic pain. Management of chronic pain presents a unique challenge to hospitalists. Existing clinical guidelines for chronic pain management are directed to the primary care physician.[36, 37] Acute exacerbations of chronic pain are commonly seen in hospitalized patients and should not be overlooked.[4] Management strategies that include in‐hospital, guideline‐based opioid dose adjustments are needed to address some of the concern hospitalists feel when managing chronic pain exacerbations. Involving the patient in the decision to temporarily increase their opioid dose may improve patient‐perceived pain control.[38] In addition, when possible, close communication between the hospitalist and the primary care physician may alleviate some of the uncertainty hospitalists feel when they prescribe an increased dose of chronic opioid therapy.[39, 40]
Opioid prescribing practices by hospitalists were influenced by past negative experiences. This principle, defined as negativity bias, refers to the notion that in most situations, negative events are more salient, potent, and dominant than positive events.[41, 42] Hospitalists recounted situations in which their patients overdosed on opioids in the hospital or forged an opioid prescription, which they perceived as jeopardizing their DEA licenses or reputations. They described concrete practice changes they made in an attempt to avoid these situations in the future. Whereas it is appropriate to critically assess practice behaviors that contribute to unanticipated patient outcomes, there may be unintended consequences when providers narrowly focus on the negative, including the undertreatment of pain. Focusing on successful outcomes associated with opioid prescribing, rather than negative outcomes, may lead to less restrictive and more thoughtful opioid prescribing practices. Furthermore, standardizing opioid prescribing to protect physicians from medicolegal consequences related to opioid diversion and fraud could lessen physicians' fears when prescribing opioids both during the hospitalization and at hospital discharge.
Hospitalists described prescribing opioids as a tool to improve efficiency in their practice, although at times it left them feeling conflicted. We interpreted this as a form of cognitive dissonance.[43] Hospitalists are acutely aware of the need to prevent costly hospital readmissions for their own success and longevity, which may lead them to become less judicious about how they prescribe opioids.[44, 45, 46] Our findings suggest a delicate balance between the potential benefits and drawbacks of using opioids to improve efficiency. Whereas it is important to provide pain relief to the patient, which can facilitate a discharge or delay time to next hospital admission, using opioids to smooth a difficult discharge may be detrimental to the patient. These findings highlight the competing pressures hospitalists face to deliver value‐based care[46, 47] while maintaining patient‐centered care.[48, 49]
This study has several limitations. First, qualitative data provide depth to the understanding of a behavior, but not breadth.[50, 51] Therefore, these results may not be generalizable to all hospitalists. We included a convenience sample of hospitalists who practiced in diverse settings including academic and private hospitals and the western and southern regions of the United States. The majority of the hospitalists interviewed had clinical experience less than 10 years. A national survey of hospitalists found the mean years of experience to be 6.9 years[16]; thus, the hospitalists we interviewed are likely representative of hospitalists nationally when considering clinical experience. Second, our interview guide was informed by prior literature and an a priori knowledge based on our experience as practicing hospitalist physicians. Interviews were conducted by 2 hospitalists who may have had similar experiences as those being described by the interviewees. Having shared experiences facilitated rapport and understating between the interviewers and participants; at the same time, however, shared experiences may have narrowed the focus of the interviews, eliminating themes that were already assumed. Lastly, hospitalists who chose to be interviewed may have participated because they felt strongly about the issues discussed and may not fully represent the population from which the sample was drawn.[15]
The development of evidence‐based strategies to promote optimal opioid prescribing for the management of acute exacerbations of chronic pain among hospitalized patients may benefit both hospital providers and patients who have a mutual goal for safe and effective pain relief. Methods to provide adequate pain relief to patients that allow hospitalists to maintain efficiency, while ensuring protection from medicolegal consequences related to opioid diversion or opioid overdose, are urgently needed.
Disclosures
This work was supported by the Denver Health Department of Medicine Small Grants Program, which was not involved in the design, conduct, or reporting of the study, or in the decision to submit the manuscript for publication. Dr. Binswanger was supported by the National Institute On Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health under award number R34DA035952. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. The authors declare that they do not have any conflicts of interest.
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Pain is a frequent symptom among patients seen in the hospital.[1, 2, 3] Hospitalized patients often suffer before they come to the hospital and are commonly prescribed opioids in the months preceding their hospital stay.[4] Adequate pain control is important because uncontrolled pain is associated with higher levels of depression and anxiety among hospitalized patients.[5] In 2011, the Institute of Medicine called on healthcare providers to improve pain assessment and management in healthcare delivery.[6] Since then, pain management has become a key quality indicator for hospitals, and providers are encouraged to frequently assess and treat pain.[7, 8, 9, 10] Although the use of opioids for pain management among hospitalized patients is routine, the amount of opioids prescribed per patient varies widely between institutions.[11] In‐hospital guidelines for the optimal management of acute exacerbations of chronic pain are lacking.
Pain management also carries risks. Recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged clinicians to prevent opioid overdoses by following best prescribing practices including screening patients for substance use disorders, mental health issues, and avoiding combinations of opioids and sedatives.[12, 13] These guidelines may be at odds with the priorities of current hospital care, which focus on patient‐perceived pain control rather than potential long‐term consequences of opioid use.[7, 8, 14] In light of the competing demands to provide adequate pain relief to hospitalized patients while optimally prescribing opioids, we sought to understand physicians' attitudes, beliefs, and experiences that inform opioid prescribing practices during hospitalization and at discharge.
METHODS
Study Design, Setting, and Participants
Between January 2015 and August 2015, we recruited a convenience sample via e‐mail solicitation from approximately 135 hospitalists practicing in Colorado and South Carolina.[15] Fifty‐three physicians responded. We conducted 25 in‐depth, semistructured interviews with physicians who represented the average hospitalist practicing in the United States in terms of years in practice and gender.[16] We enrolled physicians working in 4 distinct types of hospital settings, including 2 university hospitals, a safety‐net hospital, a Veterans Affairs hospital, and a private hospital. We used purposive sampling to achieve an even distribution with respect to gender and years in practice.[17] Interviews were either face‐to‐face (n = 16) or over the telephone (n = 9) and were performed outside of the physician's clinical shift. Informed consent was obtained from study participants, and the interview duration was approximately 1 hour. The study was approved by the Colorado Multiple Institutional Review Board.
Interview Guide Development and Content
Members of our multidisciplinary team (S.L.C., I.A.B., S.K.) developed an interview guide designed to explore hospitalists' attitudes and practices about opioid prescribing during hospitalization and at discharge (see Supporting Information, Appendix 1, in the online version of this article). Initial interview questions were developed with input from health sciences researchers (S.E.L., A.D.D., R.D.) and qualitative researchers (I.A.B., S.K.). During data collection, we occasionally edited or added questions to our guide to more fully explore new issues or information emerging from our interviews. Through open‐ended interviews, we sought to capture a qualitative narrative in which hospitalists would describe their attitudes and practices that may influence opioid prescribing within 3 major domains pertinent to clinical practice: patient factors,[18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23] physician factors,[24, 25, 26, 27] and institutional factors.[27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32] These domains were based on prior literature. All participants received a $25 gift card.
Data Analysis
Interview transcripts and a demographic survey were our primary data sources. Transcript files were entered into qualitative data analysis software (ATLAS.ti; Scientific Software Development GmbH, Berlin, Germany). We used a mixed inductive and deductive,[33] participatory, team‐based approach to explore patterns and themes related to attitudes and practices around opioid prescribing.[34, 35] A deductive or top‐down approach was used to link text to predefined codes and categories based on literature, prior knowledge, and our interview guide. An inductive or bottom‐up approach was used to identify new codes and categories that emerged from the data, including unanticipated information relevant to our research questions.
Team members included 2 hospitalists (S.L.C., A.D.D.), 2 research assistants with experience in qualitative methods (S.E.L., R.D.), an addiction medicine physician and researcher (I.A.B.), and a medical anthropologist (S.K.). S.L.C. performed initial coding using an a priori template that reflected the primary areas of interest in the study. The codes were categorized as patient, physician, and institutional factors. Using this template as a guide, 3 other team members (S.E.L., A.D.D., R.D.) independently coded 3 transcripts by assigning predefined codes to text and assigning new codes to emergent findings. Using this subset of 4 transcripts, the team reached a consensus on initial codes to be applied to the remaining transcripts. In weekly meetings, team members discussed and modified the codebook based on inconsistencies noted among team members to refine the coding scheme and to ensure consensus. Through group consensus, codes were condensed into a list of categories, subcategories, and emergent themes (ie, themes that did not originate from summarized answers to specific interview questions). The team identified emergent themes represented across all major domains (Table 1). Three of the most prevalent themes representing physicians' personal opioid prescribing practices are reported here. The study team determined that thematic saturation was reached after 25 interviews, as additional interview data created little change to the codebook and no new patterns or themes emerged.
|
| Perceived success, satisfaction, comfort, and the use of opioids for pain management* |
| Professional experiences influenced opioid prescribing practices* |
| The use of opioids to improve efficiency* |
| Skepticism between other physician subspecialty types and opioid prescribing practices |
| Unintended consequences of patient‐perceived pain control metrics and opioid prescribing |
| Lack of trust with patients when reported pain level was not supported with objective data |
| Resident burnout contributed to a lack of empathy and undertreatment of pain |
| Limited perceived risk of personal opioid prescribing practices and patient overdose with short‐acting opioids |
| Unreal expectations by patients to have complete pain eradication contributes to overprescribing |
| Recognition that patient profiling impacts personal opioid‐prescribing practices |
RESULTS
Of the 25 hospitalist participants who were all trained in internal medicine, 16 (64%) were women. The majority were non‐Hispanic white (21 [84%]). Nine physicians (36%) completed residency within the past 5 years, 12 (48%) completed residency within the past 5 to 10 years, and 4 (16%) completed residency >10 years ago. Sixteen (64%) hospitalists practiced medicine in Colorado, where 8 (32%) worked in a safety‐net hospital, 5 (20%) worked in a university hospital, and 3 (12%) worked in a Veterans Affairs hospital. Nine hospitalists (36%) practiced in South Carolina, where 2 (8%) worked in a university hospital and 7 (28%) worked in a private hospital (Table 2).
| Female, no. (%) | 16 (64) |
| Race/ethnicity, no. (%) | |
| White, non‐Hispanic | 21 (84) |
| Asian, non‐Hispanic | 4 (16) |
| Years postresidency, no. (%) | |
| 5 | 9 (36) |
| 510 | 12 (48) |
| >10 | 4 (16) |
| State of practice, no. (%) | |
| Colorado | 16 (64) |
| South Carolina | 9 (36) |
| Private hospital, no. (%) | 7 (28) |
| Academic institution, no. (%) | |
| Safety‐net hospital | 8 (32) |
| Veteran Affairs hospital | 3 (12) |
| University hospital | 7 (28) |
Emergent themes described here include: (1) hospitalists' perceived success, satisfaction, and comfort when prescribing opioids for their patients' pain management; (2) the influence of physicians' professional sentinel experiences on opioid prescribing practices; and (3) opioid prescribing as a tool to improve efficiency in the hospital. Additional quotations to support emergent themes are listed in Table 3.
| Theme | Illustrative Quote |
|---|---|
| |
| Perceived success, satisfaction, comfort, and the use of opioids for pain management | Acute pain: I'm more comfortable treating acute pain. With chronic pain, it depends on the circumstance. There are certain people who have objective reasons to have chronic pain, for instance they have severe degenerate disc disease, for example. With chronic painlet me just say, getting their pain under control is quite challenging. Acute pain is much more straight forward to treat. |
| Chronic pain; If I am treating an exacerbation of someone's chronic pain, it makes me a little less comfortable as far as sending people out on large doses of opioids because of the whole addiction thought behind it. And you don't want to start or feed people's addiction. Or, you know, lead them to it, in the future, requiring increased doses of opioids. | |
| Chronic pain: I have a hard time feeling like I'm very successful with people who have chronic noncancer pain who come in for an exacerbation. Unless I can figure out clear reasons for that exacerbation, I feel I rarely succeed in having the patient, the providers, and the caregivers be happy. It is an unrewarding situation all around. | |
| Chronic pain: I'm less comfortable treating chronic pain because we don't know the patients as well, I think, in the hospital, and you just worry about people abusing the system to get their needs met while they are in the hospital. We don't have much objective data in terms of assessing pain, and you know, they are on chronic narcotics, you don't really know what to believe, I guess. | |
| Professional experiences that influenced opioid prescribing practices | In the hospital: I had 1 horrible experience. I had a young woman who came in with chronic abdominal pain. She told me how much opioids she took. It was before there was a statewide database and I couldn't verify her doses. I gave her what she told me she was taking. I hadn't put a pulse ox on her which I always do now because it makes me feel better. Later the nurse called and said she wasn't responsive. I put her on Pulse Ox and she was sating 30% and blue. A code was called and we brought her back. That was in my mind for ever, I almost killed a 23 year old. |
| In the hospital: I think past experiences inform what I do now. I mean it's not that I've murdered anybody, but there was a time when I took over a patient and didn't realize that, while she had terrible pain from her restless leg syndrome, she also had severe pulmonary hypertension. I gave her 5 mg of oxycodone. She ended up somnolent with hypercarbic respiratory failure. I think that is something that will always stick in my head. | |
| Discharge: When discussing what type of opioids prescribed at dischargeI worry about, not just deliberate diversion, but for the patient being robbed, for the type of opioid I might choose. So I might do oxycodone instead of Percocet. Percocet, itself, has a higher street value then oxycodone. That may be completely false, but I think of it as a name brand that people want. | |
| Discharge: I think many providers, including myself, try to minimize the use of opiates when we can. I think we are all concerned every time we write, you know, our DEA #. Even when we have other providers ask us, you know, to prescribe opioids for their patients because they are out of the hospital or something like that, it is always a touchy subject. Because I think we all feel like our license is always at risk every time we are writing opioids. | |
| Discharge: I give them what they need but I want them to be seen in follow‐up. I encourage that by giving them a shortened course. I'm more skeptical. I've seen people misuse, have bad side effects, and overdose on opioids. I worry about that, so I tend to prescribe shorter courses and less. | |
| The use of opioids to improve efficiency | There is always the group of patients [for whom] we've done everything we can. We set up follow‐up. If giving you a few days of Percocet is going to help you leave the hospital comfortably and stay out of the hospital for appropriate reasons, then we give them a few days. It's horrible but... |
| I'll give 4 or 6 weeks' worth of opioid medication to the chronic abdominal pain patients, the ones who have ERCPs scheduled for every 4 or 6 weeks. You sort of end up managing their chronic pain. It's the people that we know. If you don't give them a month's worth of pain meds, they are going to come back in to the hospital. Because they always come in when they run out. | |
| I think physicians overprescribe opioids because we don't want people to bounce back to the hospital. We don't want them to have acute pain at home and have to go back to the ER to be readmitted. You don't want someone to be in pain. I think that sometimes people go overboard. I also think that sometimes physicians gauge like, oh, this person isn't a huge risk, and maybe give them more opioids than necessary. | |
Perceived Success, Satisfaction, and Comfort When Prescribing Opioids for Pain Management
Providing adequate pain control to their patients was of utmost importance to hospitalists and influenced opioid prescribing. Hospitalists felt confident in their ability to control acute pain using opioids, but notably perceived limited success in achieving adequate patient‐perceived pain control when treating acute exacerbations of chronic pain with opioids. A physician described his confidence in treating severe, acute pain:
If someone is dying of cancer, or if they have an acutely broken femur, I don't really care if they are actively in the 12‐Step Program or Narcotics Anonymous to stay sober. That pain is real and there is no effective pain medicine on earth except for opioids.
[I am uncomfortable treating] people that you classify with chronic pain syndrome. There is that terminology you use for people who have subjective pain, out of proportion to objective findings. In my experience it is a black hole. You never get an adequate level of pain control and you keep adding the doses up and they get habituated. An end point is very difficult to achieve. Not like with acute pain.
All of these things you do for patient satisfaction set up people, who aren't ever going to be without pain, to fail. They have pain all the time, and now you are asking them about their pain. Well, of course their pain is not controlled, because their pain is never going to be less than 5 out of 10, period. And no opioid is going to get them there, unless they are unconscious.
Professional Experiences Influenced Opioid Prescribing Practices
Physicians reported little opioid‐specific training during residency, and so opioid prescribing practices were shaped by the physicians' clinical experiences. Hospitalists reflected on negative, sentinel events that shaped their opioid prescribing practices in the inpatient setting or led them to adopt risk‐modifying behaviors when prescribing opioids at hospital discharge. Negative experiences varied and included a fatal overdose and suspected diversion of opioids for sale. A physician reflected on an avoidable in‐hospital overdose which left her more guarded when prescribing opioids:
It is both your cumulative experience and, sometimes, when you've had a negative experience, it really biases how you think. I've had an experience where my patient actually overdosed. She crushed up the oxycodone we were giving her in the hospital and shot it up through her central line and died. We've all had experiences with opioids being abused. This just happened to be a very dramatic thing that happened right under my nose. It just makes me more guarded, in terms of my practice, and the lengths people will go through to do harm to themselves with opioids.
Hospitalists recognized that some of their patients had limited resources. They expressed suspicions that opioid prescriptions, in some cases, represented a form of currency for patients to supplement their income. A physician stated:
I think our population can divert quite a few meds. I think their financial situations can be really tenuous. Sometimes they sell pills to survive.
Physicians described past experiences with patients who were deceptive to get an opioid prescription, which left them much more reticent to prescribe the drugs. For example, a physician described how a patient altered her opioid prescription following hospital discharge:
I saw a patient who had her gallbladder removed. She asked for an opioid script until she could see her primary care physician, so I gave her a few days of opioids. I later found out she had forged my script and had changed it from 18 pills to 180 pills. She took it all over the state to try to fill. I got a call from the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] and had to write them a letter. I think she's in prison now.
These experiences inspired hospitalists to adopt strategies around opioid prescribing that would make it harder for a patient to misuse a prescription or to jeopardize their DEA license. A physician discussed her technique to prevent patients from selling their opioid prescriptions following discharge:
When I write the prescription, I put the name of the patient on the paper prescription with the patient's sticker on top. I don't want the patients to pull it off and sell the prescription, especially when it is my license.
Another physician described feeling reassured when she is able to verify a patient's opioid dose in a statewide prescription monitoring program:
Seeing they have filled opioids before supports your decision making. You just sort of cross your finger that this time my DEA number is not going to come up on the next drug bust!
The Use of Opioids to Improve Institutional Efficiency
Hospitalists felt institutional pressure to reduce hospital readmissions and to facilitate discharges. Pain was a common complaint among patients admitted to the hospital, and uncontrolled pain often prolonged a hospital stay. In these ways, physicians viewed opioid prescriptions as a tool to buffer against readmission or long hospital stays. A physician described his approach to more readily prescribed opioids when he felt it would prevent a patient from being rehospitalized:
If a patient tells you that they are in pain and they are receiving opioids in the hospital, and I have a strong sense that this is a person who comes back to the hospital easily and regularly if something is not right, I'm more likely to make sure that patient has adequate pain medicine for a reasonable duration of time to reduce the chance that they get readmitted just for pain alone.
Physicians used opioids as a tool to facilitate discharges and prevent readmissions; yet doing so sometimes left them feeling conflicted. On one hand, they felt pressured to maintain efficiency; on the other hand, they recognized it might not be in the patient's best interest to receive a higher than necessary quantity of opioids at discharge. A physician described his dilemma:
For the acute pain, I usually give them 15 to 20 [opioid pills]. For the chronics, maybe a little bit more like 30. A lot of them have told me they can just buy it off the street anyway. If we can help keep them out of the hospital, we are probably doing them a disservice [by prescribing more opioids], but we are also not clogging up our system.
Similarly, another hospitalist described opioid prescribing at discharge as a way to reduce hospital costs and prevent a readmission, despite feeling uncomfortable when a patient's diagnosis of pain was nebulous:
If the patient comes back and gets readmitted to the hospital when they don't have pain medicine, it's a $3,000.00, 2‐day stay in the hospital that was unnecessary. And when they have a prescription for a month of pain medicine, they stay out of the hospital. That is utterly pragmaticthere is no other way to do it and it's going to work. At other times, especially when a patient lacks a diagnosis which is known to cause pain, it can feel cheap and dirty.
DISCUSSION
To our knowledge, this is the first study to qualitatively explore the hospitalist perspective on opioid prescribing during hospitalization and at discharge. Hospitalists expressed discomfort and dissatisfaction when managing acute exacerbations of chronic pain with opioid medications. This stemmed from the discordance between the patients' expressed pain and the lack of objective clinical findings of pain, a perceived inability to adequately provide relief to patients with chronic pain, and a concern of contributing to future opioid dependence. Hospitalists identified negative professional experiences with opioid prescribing as a factor that influenced their opioid prescribing practices. Hospitalists also described using opioids as a tool to reduce readmissions and facilitate hospital discharges to contain healthcare costs. This sometimes left them feeling conflicted, especially when their patients lacked clear, pain‐related diagnoses.
Hospitalists were reluctant to increase patients' chronic opioid therapy doses, even when patients had acute exacerbations of chronic pain. Management of chronic pain presents a unique challenge to hospitalists. Existing clinical guidelines for chronic pain management are directed to the primary care physician.[36, 37] Acute exacerbations of chronic pain are commonly seen in hospitalized patients and should not be overlooked.[4] Management strategies that include in‐hospital, guideline‐based opioid dose adjustments are needed to address some of the concern hospitalists feel when managing chronic pain exacerbations. Involving the patient in the decision to temporarily increase their opioid dose may improve patient‐perceived pain control.[38] In addition, when possible, close communication between the hospitalist and the primary care physician may alleviate some of the uncertainty hospitalists feel when they prescribe an increased dose of chronic opioid therapy.[39, 40]
Opioid prescribing practices by hospitalists were influenced by past negative experiences. This principle, defined as negativity bias, refers to the notion that in most situations, negative events are more salient, potent, and dominant than positive events.[41, 42] Hospitalists recounted situations in which their patients overdosed on opioids in the hospital or forged an opioid prescription, which they perceived as jeopardizing their DEA licenses or reputations. They described concrete practice changes they made in an attempt to avoid these situations in the future. Whereas it is appropriate to critically assess practice behaviors that contribute to unanticipated patient outcomes, there may be unintended consequences when providers narrowly focus on the negative, including the undertreatment of pain. Focusing on successful outcomes associated with opioid prescribing, rather than negative outcomes, may lead to less restrictive and more thoughtful opioid prescribing practices. Furthermore, standardizing opioid prescribing to protect physicians from medicolegal consequences related to opioid diversion and fraud could lessen physicians' fears when prescribing opioids both during the hospitalization and at hospital discharge.
Hospitalists described prescribing opioids as a tool to improve efficiency in their practice, although at times it left them feeling conflicted. We interpreted this as a form of cognitive dissonance.[43] Hospitalists are acutely aware of the need to prevent costly hospital readmissions for their own success and longevity, which may lead them to become less judicious about how they prescribe opioids.[44, 45, 46] Our findings suggest a delicate balance between the potential benefits and drawbacks of using opioids to improve efficiency. Whereas it is important to provide pain relief to the patient, which can facilitate a discharge or delay time to next hospital admission, using opioids to smooth a difficult discharge may be detrimental to the patient. These findings highlight the competing pressures hospitalists face to deliver value‐based care[46, 47] while maintaining patient‐centered care.[48, 49]
This study has several limitations. First, qualitative data provide depth to the understanding of a behavior, but not breadth.[50, 51] Therefore, these results may not be generalizable to all hospitalists. We included a convenience sample of hospitalists who practiced in diverse settings including academic and private hospitals and the western and southern regions of the United States. The majority of the hospitalists interviewed had clinical experience less than 10 years. A national survey of hospitalists found the mean years of experience to be 6.9 years[16]; thus, the hospitalists we interviewed are likely representative of hospitalists nationally when considering clinical experience. Second, our interview guide was informed by prior literature and an a priori knowledge based on our experience as practicing hospitalist physicians. Interviews were conducted by 2 hospitalists who may have had similar experiences as those being described by the interviewees. Having shared experiences facilitated rapport and understating between the interviewers and participants; at the same time, however, shared experiences may have narrowed the focus of the interviews, eliminating themes that were already assumed. Lastly, hospitalists who chose to be interviewed may have participated because they felt strongly about the issues discussed and may not fully represent the population from which the sample was drawn.[15]
The development of evidence‐based strategies to promote optimal opioid prescribing for the management of acute exacerbations of chronic pain among hospitalized patients may benefit both hospital providers and patients who have a mutual goal for safe and effective pain relief. Methods to provide adequate pain relief to patients that allow hospitalists to maintain efficiency, while ensuring protection from medicolegal consequences related to opioid diversion or opioid overdose, are urgently needed.
Disclosures
This work was supported by the Denver Health Department of Medicine Small Grants Program, which was not involved in the design, conduct, or reporting of the study, or in the decision to submit the manuscript for publication. Dr. Binswanger was supported by the National Institute On Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health under award number R34DA035952. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. The authors declare that they do not have any conflicts of interest.
Pain is a frequent symptom among patients seen in the hospital.[1, 2, 3] Hospitalized patients often suffer before they come to the hospital and are commonly prescribed opioids in the months preceding their hospital stay.[4] Adequate pain control is important because uncontrolled pain is associated with higher levels of depression and anxiety among hospitalized patients.[5] In 2011, the Institute of Medicine called on healthcare providers to improve pain assessment and management in healthcare delivery.[6] Since then, pain management has become a key quality indicator for hospitals, and providers are encouraged to frequently assess and treat pain.[7, 8, 9, 10] Although the use of opioids for pain management among hospitalized patients is routine, the amount of opioids prescribed per patient varies widely between institutions.[11] In‐hospital guidelines for the optimal management of acute exacerbations of chronic pain are lacking.
Pain management also carries risks. Recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged clinicians to prevent opioid overdoses by following best prescribing practices including screening patients for substance use disorders, mental health issues, and avoiding combinations of opioids and sedatives.[12, 13] These guidelines may be at odds with the priorities of current hospital care, which focus on patient‐perceived pain control rather than potential long‐term consequences of opioid use.[7, 8, 14] In light of the competing demands to provide adequate pain relief to hospitalized patients while optimally prescribing opioids, we sought to understand physicians' attitudes, beliefs, and experiences that inform opioid prescribing practices during hospitalization and at discharge.
METHODS
Study Design, Setting, and Participants
Between January 2015 and August 2015, we recruited a convenience sample via e‐mail solicitation from approximately 135 hospitalists practicing in Colorado and South Carolina.[15] Fifty‐three physicians responded. We conducted 25 in‐depth, semistructured interviews with physicians who represented the average hospitalist practicing in the United States in terms of years in practice and gender.[16] We enrolled physicians working in 4 distinct types of hospital settings, including 2 university hospitals, a safety‐net hospital, a Veterans Affairs hospital, and a private hospital. We used purposive sampling to achieve an even distribution with respect to gender and years in practice.[17] Interviews were either face‐to‐face (n = 16) or over the telephone (n = 9) and were performed outside of the physician's clinical shift. Informed consent was obtained from study participants, and the interview duration was approximately 1 hour. The study was approved by the Colorado Multiple Institutional Review Board.
Interview Guide Development and Content
Members of our multidisciplinary team (S.L.C., I.A.B., S.K.) developed an interview guide designed to explore hospitalists' attitudes and practices about opioid prescribing during hospitalization and at discharge (see Supporting Information, Appendix 1, in the online version of this article). Initial interview questions were developed with input from health sciences researchers (S.E.L., A.D.D., R.D.) and qualitative researchers (I.A.B., S.K.). During data collection, we occasionally edited or added questions to our guide to more fully explore new issues or information emerging from our interviews. Through open‐ended interviews, we sought to capture a qualitative narrative in which hospitalists would describe their attitudes and practices that may influence opioid prescribing within 3 major domains pertinent to clinical practice: patient factors,[18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23] physician factors,[24, 25, 26, 27] and institutional factors.[27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32] These domains were based on prior literature. All participants received a $25 gift card.
Data Analysis
Interview transcripts and a demographic survey were our primary data sources. Transcript files were entered into qualitative data analysis software (ATLAS.ti; Scientific Software Development GmbH, Berlin, Germany). We used a mixed inductive and deductive,[33] participatory, team‐based approach to explore patterns and themes related to attitudes and practices around opioid prescribing.[34, 35] A deductive or top‐down approach was used to link text to predefined codes and categories based on literature, prior knowledge, and our interview guide. An inductive or bottom‐up approach was used to identify new codes and categories that emerged from the data, including unanticipated information relevant to our research questions.
Team members included 2 hospitalists (S.L.C., A.D.D.), 2 research assistants with experience in qualitative methods (S.E.L., R.D.), an addiction medicine physician and researcher (I.A.B.), and a medical anthropologist (S.K.). S.L.C. performed initial coding using an a priori template that reflected the primary areas of interest in the study. The codes were categorized as patient, physician, and institutional factors. Using this template as a guide, 3 other team members (S.E.L., A.D.D., R.D.) independently coded 3 transcripts by assigning predefined codes to text and assigning new codes to emergent findings. Using this subset of 4 transcripts, the team reached a consensus on initial codes to be applied to the remaining transcripts. In weekly meetings, team members discussed and modified the codebook based on inconsistencies noted among team members to refine the coding scheme and to ensure consensus. Through group consensus, codes were condensed into a list of categories, subcategories, and emergent themes (ie, themes that did not originate from summarized answers to specific interview questions). The team identified emergent themes represented across all major domains (Table 1). Three of the most prevalent themes representing physicians' personal opioid prescribing practices are reported here. The study team determined that thematic saturation was reached after 25 interviews, as additional interview data created little change to the codebook and no new patterns or themes emerged.
|
| Perceived success, satisfaction, comfort, and the use of opioids for pain management* |
| Professional experiences influenced opioid prescribing practices* |
| The use of opioids to improve efficiency* |
| Skepticism between other physician subspecialty types and opioid prescribing practices |
| Unintended consequences of patient‐perceived pain control metrics and opioid prescribing |
| Lack of trust with patients when reported pain level was not supported with objective data |
| Resident burnout contributed to a lack of empathy and undertreatment of pain |
| Limited perceived risk of personal opioid prescribing practices and patient overdose with short‐acting opioids |
| Unreal expectations by patients to have complete pain eradication contributes to overprescribing |
| Recognition that patient profiling impacts personal opioid‐prescribing practices |
RESULTS
Of the 25 hospitalist participants who were all trained in internal medicine, 16 (64%) were women. The majority were non‐Hispanic white (21 [84%]). Nine physicians (36%) completed residency within the past 5 years, 12 (48%) completed residency within the past 5 to 10 years, and 4 (16%) completed residency >10 years ago. Sixteen (64%) hospitalists practiced medicine in Colorado, where 8 (32%) worked in a safety‐net hospital, 5 (20%) worked in a university hospital, and 3 (12%) worked in a Veterans Affairs hospital. Nine hospitalists (36%) practiced in South Carolina, where 2 (8%) worked in a university hospital and 7 (28%) worked in a private hospital (Table 2).
| Female, no. (%) | 16 (64) |
| Race/ethnicity, no. (%) | |
| White, non‐Hispanic | 21 (84) |
| Asian, non‐Hispanic | 4 (16) |
| Years postresidency, no. (%) | |
| 5 | 9 (36) |
| 510 | 12 (48) |
| >10 | 4 (16) |
| State of practice, no. (%) | |
| Colorado | 16 (64) |
| South Carolina | 9 (36) |
| Private hospital, no. (%) | 7 (28) |
| Academic institution, no. (%) | |
| Safety‐net hospital | 8 (32) |
| Veteran Affairs hospital | 3 (12) |
| University hospital | 7 (28) |
Emergent themes described here include: (1) hospitalists' perceived success, satisfaction, and comfort when prescribing opioids for their patients' pain management; (2) the influence of physicians' professional sentinel experiences on opioid prescribing practices; and (3) opioid prescribing as a tool to improve efficiency in the hospital. Additional quotations to support emergent themes are listed in Table 3.
| Theme | Illustrative Quote |
|---|---|
| |
| Perceived success, satisfaction, comfort, and the use of opioids for pain management | Acute pain: I'm more comfortable treating acute pain. With chronic pain, it depends on the circumstance. There are certain people who have objective reasons to have chronic pain, for instance they have severe degenerate disc disease, for example. With chronic painlet me just say, getting their pain under control is quite challenging. Acute pain is much more straight forward to treat. |
| Chronic pain; If I am treating an exacerbation of someone's chronic pain, it makes me a little less comfortable as far as sending people out on large doses of opioids because of the whole addiction thought behind it. And you don't want to start or feed people's addiction. Or, you know, lead them to it, in the future, requiring increased doses of opioids. | |
| Chronic pain: I have a hard time feeling like I'm very successful with people who have chronic noncancer pain who come in for an exacerbation. Unless I can figure out clear reasons for that exacerbation, I feel I rarely succeed in having the patient, the providers, and the caregivers be happy. It is an unrewarding situation all around. | |
| Chronic pain: I'm less comfortable treating chronic pain because we don't know the patients as well, I think, in the hospital, and you just worry about people abusing the system to get their needs met while they are in the hospital. We don't have much objective data in terms of assessing pain, and you know, they are on chronic narcotics, you don't really know what to believe, I guess. | |
| Professional experiences that influenced opioid prescribing practices | In the hospital: I had 1 horrible experience. I had a young woman who came in with chronic abdominal pain. She told me how much opioids she took. It was before there was a statewide database and I couldn't verify her doses. I gave her what she told me she was taking. I hadn't put a pulse ox on her which I always do now because it makes me feel better. Later the nurse called and said she wasn't responsive. I put her on Pulse Ox and she was sating 30% and blue. A code was called and we brought her back. That was in my mind for ever, I almost killed a 23 year old. |
| In the hospital: I think past experiences inform what I do now. I mean it's not that I've murdered anybody, but there was a time when I took over a patient and didn't realize that, while she had terrible pain from her restless leg syndrome, she also had severe pulmonary hypertension. I gave her 5 mg of oxycodone. She ended up somnolent with hypercarbic respiratory failure. I think that is something that will always stick in my head. | |
| Discharge: When discussing what type of opioids prescribed at dischargeI worry about, not just deliberate diversion, but for the patient being robbed, for the type of opioid I might choose. So I might do oxycodone instead of Percocet. Percocet, itself, has a higher street value then oxycodone. That may be completely false, but I think of it as a name brand that people want. | |
| Discharge: I think many providers, including myself, try to minimize the use of opiates when we can. I think we are all concerned every time we write, you know, our DEA #. Even when we have other providers ask us, you know, to prescribe opioids for their patients because they are out of the hospital or something like that, it is always a touchy subject. Because I think we all feel like our license is always at risk every time we are writing opioids. | |
| Discharge: I give them what they need but I want them to be seen in follow‐up. I encourage that by giving them a shortened course. I'm more skeptical. I've seen people misuse, have bad side effects, and overdose on opioids. I worry about that, so I tend to prescribe shorter courses and less. | |
| The use of opioids to improve efficiency | There is always the group of patients [for whom] we've done everything we can. We set up follow‐up. If giving you a few days of Percocet is going to help you leave the hospital comfortably and stay out of the hospital for appropriate reasons, then we give them a few days. It's horrible but... |
| I'll give 4 or 6 weeks' worth of opioid medication to the chronic abdominal pain patients, the ones who have ERCPs scheduled for every 4 or 6 weeks. You sort of end up managing their chronic pain. It's the people that we know. If you don't give them a month's worth of pain meds, they are going to come back in to the hospital. Because they always come in when they run out. | |
| I think physicians overprescribe opioids because we don't want people to bounce back to the hospital. We don't want them to have acute pain at home and have to go back to the ER to be readmitted. You don't want someone to be in pain. I think that sometimes people go overboard. I also think that sometimes physicians gauge like, oh, this person isn't a huge risk, and maybe give them more opioids than necessary. | |
Perceived Success, Satisfaction, and Comfort When Prescribing Opioids for Pain Management
Providing adequate pain control to their patients was of utmost importance to hospitalists and influenced opioid prescribing. Hospitalists felt confident in their ability to control acute pain using opioids, but notably perceived limited success in achieving adequate patient‐perceived pain control when treating acute exacerbations of chronic pain with opioids. A physician described his confidence in treating severe, acute pain:
If someone is dying of cancer, or if they have an acutely broken femur, I don't really care if they are actively in the 12‐Step Program or Narcotics Anonymous to stay sober. That pain is real and there is no effective pain medicine on earth except for opioids.
[I am uncomfortable treating] people that you classify with chronic pain syndrome. There is that terminology you use for people who have subjective pain, out of proportion to objective findings. In my experience it is a black hole. You never get an adequate level of pain control and you keep adding the doses up and they get habituated. An end point is very difficult to achieve. Not like with acute pain.
All of these things you do for patient satisfaction set up people, who aren't ever going to be without pain, to fail. They have pain all the time, and now you are asking them about their pain. Well, of course their pain is not controlled, because their pain is never going to be less than 5 out of 10, period. And no opioid is going to get them there, unless they are unconscious.
Professional Experiences Influenced Opioid Prescribing Practices
Physicians reported little opioid‐specific training during residency, and so opioid prescribing practices were shaped by the physicians' clinical experiences. Hospitalists reflected on negative, sentinel events that shaped their opioid prescribing practices in the inpatient setting or led them to adopt risk‐modifying behaviors when prescribing opioids at hospital discharge. Negative experiences varied and included a fatal overdose and suspected diversion of opioids for sale. A physician reflected on an avoidable in‐hospital overdose which left her more guarded when prescribing opioids:
It is both your cumulative experience and, sometimes, when you've had a negative experience, it really biases how you think. I've had an experience where my patient actually overdosed. She crushed up the oxycodone we were giving her in the hospital and shot it up through her central line and died. We've all had experiences with opioids being abused. This just happened to be a very dramatic thing that happened right under my nose. It just makes me more guarded, in terms of my practice, and the lengths people will go through to do harm to themselves with opioids.
Hospitalists recognized that some of their patients had limited resources. They expressed suspicions that opioid prescriptions, in some cases, represented a form of currency for patients to supplement their income. A physician stated:
I think our population can divert quite a few meds. I think their financial situations can be really tenuous. Sometimes they sell pills to survive.
Physicians described past experiences with patients who were deceptive to get an opioid prescription, which left them much more reticent to prescribe the drugs. For example, a physician described how a patient altered her opioid prescription following hospital discharge:
I saw a patient who had her gallbladder removed. She asked for an opioid script until she could see her primary care physician, so I gave her a few days of opioids. I later found out she had forged my script and had changed it from 18 pills to 180 pills. She took it all over the state to try to fill. I got a call from the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] and had to write them a letter. I think she's in prison now.
These experiences inspired hospitalists to adopt strategies around opioid prescribing that would make it harder for a patient to misuse a prescription or to jeopardize their DEA license. A physician discussed her technique to prevent patients from selling their opioid prescriptions following discharge:
When I write the prescription, I put the name of the patient on the paper prescription with the patient's sticker on top. I don't want the patients to pull it off and sell the prescription, especially when it is my license.
Another physician described feeling reassured when she is able to verify a patient's opioid dose in a statewide prescription monitoring program:
Seeing they have filled opioids before supports your decision making. You just sort of cross your finger that this time my DEA number is not going to come up on the next drug bust!
The Use of Opioids to Improve Institutional Efficiency
Hospitalists felt institutional pressure to reduce hospital readmissions and to facilitate discharges. Pain was a common complaint among patients admitted to the hospital, and uncontrolled pain often prolonged a hospital stay. In these ways, physicians viewed opioid prescriptions as a tool to buffer against readmission or long hospital stays. A physician described his approach to more readily prescribed opioids when he felt it would prevent a patient from being rehospitalized:
If a patient tells you that they are in pain and they are receiving opioids in the hospital, and I have a strong sense that this is a person who comes back to the hospital easily and regularly if something is not right, I'm more likely to make sure that patient has adequate pain medicine for a reasonable duration of time to reduce the chance that they get readmitted just for pain alone.
Physicians used opioids as a tool to facilitate discharges and prevent readmissions; yet doing so sometimes left them feeling conflicted. On one hand, they felt pressured to maintain efficiency; on the other hand, they recognized it might not be in the patient's best interest to receive a higher than necessary quantity of opioids at discharge. A physician described his dilemma:
For the acute pain, I usually give them 15 to 20 [opioid pills]. For the chronics, maybe a little bit more like 30. A lot of them have told me they can just buy it off the street anyway. If we can help keep them out of the hospital, we are probably doing them a disservice [by prescribing more opioids], but we are also not clogging up our system.
Similarly, another hospitalist described opioid prescribing at discharge as a way to reduce hospital costs and prevent a readmission, despite feeling uncomfortable when a patient's diagnosis of pain was nebulous:
If the patient comes back and gets readmitted to the hospital when they don't have pain medicine, it's a $3,000.00, 2‐day stay in the hospital that was unnecessary. And when they have a prescription for a month of pain medicine, they stay out of the hospital. That is utterly pragmaticthere is no other way to do it and it's going to work. At other times, especially when a patient lacks a diagnosis which is known to cause pain, it can feel cheap and dirty.
DISCUSSION
To our knowledge, this is the first study to qualitatively explore the hospitalist perspective on opioid prescribing during hospitalization and at discharge. Hospitalists expressed discomfort and dissatisfaction when managing acute exacerbations of chronic pain with opioid medications. This stemmed from the discordance between the patients' expressed pain and the lack of objective clinical findings of pain, a perceived inability to adequately provide relief to patients with chronic pain, and a concern of contributing to future opioid dependence. Hospitalists identified negative professional experiences with opioid prescribing as a factor that influenced their opioid prescribing practices. Hospitalists also described using opioids as a tool to reduce readmissions and facilitate hospital discharges to contain healthcare costs. This sometimes left them feeling conflicted, especially when their patients lacked clear, pain‐related diagnoses.
Hospitalists were reluctant to increase patients' chronic opioid therapy doses, even when patients had acute exacerbations of chronic pain. Management of chronic pain presents a unique challenge to hospitalists. Existing clinical guidelines for chronic pain management are directed to the primary care physician.[36, 37] Acute exacerbations of chronic pain are commonly seen in hospitalized patients and should not be overlooked.[4] Management strategies that include in‐hospital, guideline‐based opioid dose adjustments are needed to address some of the concern hospitalists feel when managing chronic pain exacerbations. Involving the patient in the decision to temporarily increase their opioid dose may improve patient‐perceived pain control.[38] In addition, when possible, close communication between the hospitalist and the primary care physician may alleviate some of the uncertainty hospitalists feel when they prescribe an increased dose of chronic opioid therapy.[39, 40]
Opioid prescribing practices by hospitalists were influenced by past negative experiences. This principle, defined as negativity bias, refers to the notion that in most situations, negative events are more salient, potent, and dominant than positive events.[41, 42] Hospitalists recounted situations in which their patients overdosed on opioids in the hospital or forged an opioid prescription, which they perceived as jeopardizing their DEA licenses or reputations. They described concrete practice changes they made in an attempt to avoid these situations in the future. Whereas it is appropriate to critically assess practice behaviors that contribute to unanticipated patient outcomes, there may be unintended consequences when providers narrowly focus on the negative, including the undertreatment of pain. Focusing on successful outcomes associated with opioid prescribing, rather than negative outcomes, may lead to less restrictive and more thoughtful opioid prescribing practices. Furthermore, standardizing opioid prescribing to protect physicians from medicolegal consequences related to opioid diversion and fraud could lessen physicians' fears when prescribing opioids both during the hospitalization and at hospital discharge.
Hospitalists described prescribing opioids as a tool to improve efficiency in their practice, although at times it left them feeling conflicted. We interpreted this as a form of cognitive dissonance.[43] Hospitalists are acutely aware of the need to prevent costly hospital readmissions for their own success and longevity, which may lead them to become less judicious about how they prescribe opioids.[44, 45, 46] Our findings suggest a delicate balance between the potential benefits and drawbacks of using opioids to improve efficiency. Whereas it is important to provide pain relief to the patient, which can facilitate a discharge or delay time to next hospital admission, using opioids to smooth a difficult discharge may be detrimental to the patient. These findings highlight the competing pressures hospitalists face to deliver value‐based care[46, 47] while maintaining patient‐centered care.[48, 49]
This study has several limitations. First, qualitative data provide depth to the understanding of a behavior, but not breadth.[50, 51] Therefore, these results may not be generalizable to all hospitalists. We included a convenience sample of hospitalists who practiced in diverse settings including academic and private hospitals and the western and southern regions of the United States. The majority of the hospitalists interviewed had clinical experience less than 10 years. A national survey of hospitalists found the mean years of experience to be 6.9 years[16]; thus, the hospitalists we interviewed are likely representative of hospitalists nationally when considering clinical experience. Second, our interview guide was informed by prior literature and an a priori knowledge based on our experience as practicing hospitalist physicians. Interviews were conducted by 2 hospitalists who may have had similar experiences as those being described by the interviewees. Having shared experiences facilitated rapport and understating between the interviewers and participants; at the same time, however, shared experiences may have narrowed the focus of the interviews, eliminating themes that were already assumed. Lastly, hospitalists who chose to be interviewed may have participated because they felt strongly about the issues discussed and may not fully represent the population from which the sample was drawn.[15]
The development of evidence‐based strategies to promote optimal opioid prescribing for the management of acute exacerbations of chronic pain among hospitalized patients may benefit both hospital providers and patients who have a mutual goal for safe and effective pain relief. Methods to provide adequate pain relief to patients that allow hospitalists to maintain efficiency, while ensuring protection from medicolegal consequences related to opioid diversion or opioid overdose, are urgently needed.
Disclosures
This work was supported by the Denver Health Department of Medicine Small Grants Program, which was not involved in the design, conduct, or reporting of the study, or in the decision to submit the manuscript for publication. Dr. Binswanger was supported by the National Institute On Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health under award number R34DA035952. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. The authors declare that they do not have any conflicts of interest.
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- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Vital signs: overdoses of prescription opioid pain relievers and other drugs among women—United States, 1999–2010. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2013;62(26):537–542.
- , , , , . Patient perception of pain care in the United States: a 5‐year comparative analysis of hospital consumer assessment of health care providers and systems. Pain Physician. 2014;17(5):369–377.
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- , , , , . What percentage of chronic nonmalignant pain patients exposed to chronic opioid analgesic therapy develop abuse/addiction and/or aberrant drug‐related behaviors? A structured evidence‐based review. Pain Med. 2008;9(4):444–459.
- , , , , , . Controlled substance abuse and illicit drug use in chronic pain patients: an evaluation of multiple variables. Pain Physician. 2006;9(3):215–225.
- , , , et al. Predictors of opioid misuse in patients with chronic pain: a prospective cohort study. BMC Health Serv Res. 2006;6:46.
- , , , , . Do users of regularly prescribed opioids have higher rates of substance use problems than nonusers? Pain Med. 2007;8(8):647–656.
- , , , et al. Prescription long‐term opioid use in HIV‐infected patients. Clin J Pain. 2012;28(1):39–46.
- , , , et al. The unequal burden of pain: confronting racial and ethnic disparities in pain. Pain Med. 2003;4(3):277–294.
- , , , , . Analysis of the physician variable in pain management. Pain Med. 2001;2(4):317–327.
- , , , , . Exploring beliefs and practice of opioid prescribing for persistent non‐cancer pain by general practitioners. Eur J Pain. 2007;11(1):93–98.
- , , , , . Beliefs and attitudes about opioid prescribing and chronic pain management: survey of primary care providers. J Opioid Manag. 2014;10(6):375–382.
- , , , . Influences of attitudes on family physicians' willingness to prescribe long‐acting opioid analgesics for patients with chronic nonmalignant pain. Clin Ther. 2007;29(suppl):2589–2602.
- . Failure of enforcement controlled substance laws in health policy for prescribing opiate medications: a painful assessment of morbidity and mortality. Am J Ther. 2006;13(6):527–533.
- , . Achieving the right balance in oversight of physician opioid prescribing for pain: the role of state medical boards. J Law Med Ethics. 2003;31(1):21–40.
- , , , , . Regulating opioid prescribing through prescription monitoring programs: balancing drug diversion and treatment of pain. Pain Med. 2004;5(3):309–324.
- . The other side of trust in health care: prescribing drugs with the potential for abuse. Bioethics. 2007;21(1):51–60.
- US Drug Enforcement Administration, Department of Justice. Schedules of controlled substances: rescheduling of hydrocodone combination products from schedule III to schedule II. Fed Regist. 2014;79(163):49661–49682.
- , . Demonstrating rigor using thematic analysis: a hybrid approach of inductive and deductive coding and theme development. Int J Qual Methods. 2008;5(1):80–92.
- , . Analyzing Qualitative Data: Systematic Approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage; 2009.
- . Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods, Third Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage; 2002.
- , , , et al. Pharmacological management of chronic neuropathic pain—consensus statement and guidelines from the Canadian Pain Society. Pain Res Manag. 2007;12(1):13–21.
- , , , et al. Clinical guidelines for the use of chronic opioid therapy in chronic noncancer pain. J Pain. 2009;10(2):113–130.
- , , , . Communication interventions make a difference in conversations between physicians and patients: a systematic review of the evidence. Med Care. 2007;45(4):340–349.
- , , , . Promoting effective transitions of care at hospital discharge: a review of key issues for hospitalists. J Hosp Med. 2007;2(5):314–323.
- , , , , . We need to talk: primary care provider communication at discharge in the era of a shared electronic medical record. J Hosp Med. 2015;10(5):307–310.
- , , , . Negative information weighs more heavily on the brain: the negativity bias in evaluative categorizations. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1998;75(4):887–900.
- , , , . Emotion, attention, and the ‘negativity bias’, studied through event‐related potentials. Int J Psychophysiol. 2001;41(1):75–85.
- , . Cognitive Dissonance: Progress on a Pivotal Theory in Social Psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association; 1999.
- , , , , . Identifying hospital organizational strategies to reduce readmissions. Am J Med Qual. 2013;28(4):278–285.
- , , , , . Avoiding readmissions‐support systems required after discharge to continue rapid recovery? J Arthroplasty. 2015;30(4):527–530.
- , , , , . Effect of hospitalist workload on the quality and efficiency of care. JAMA Intern Med. 2014;174(5):786–793.
- , , . A framework for the frontline: how hospitalists can improve healthcare value. J Hosp Med. 2016;11(4):297–302.
- , , , . Hospitalist staffing and patient satisfaction in the national Medicare population. J Hosp Med. 2013;8(3):126–131.
- , . Improving patient satisfaction: timely feedback to specific physicians is essential for success. J Hosp Med. 2015;10(8):555–556.
- , . Users' guides to the medical literature: XXIII. Qualitative research in health care B. What are the results and how do they help me care for my patients? Evidence‐Based Medicine Working Group. JAMA. 2000;284(4):478–482.
- , . Users' guides to the medical literature: XXIII. Qualitative research in health care A. Are the results of the study valid? Evidence‐Based Medicine Working Group. JAMA. 2000;284(3):357–362.