ASIPP's 2014 Annual Meeting includes many insightful and entertaining presentations

 

| BROCHURE | ONLINE REGISTRATION | HOTEL | WEBSITE

 

 

CMS cuts and regulations for Interventional Pain Management will make it difficult to practice IPM in the future! In these cuts, CMS has valued physician work to be only $40 to perform an epidural (which does not include the SGR cut) for essentially placing the needle a few millimeters away from the spinal cord. However, we planned an agenda for the ASIPP 16th Annual Meeting which addresses exactly all the issues we are facing and will prepare you for the future of healthcare. This is the only meeting that will be covering these topics and one that you can't afford to miss.

 

The ASIPP Annual Meeting will have many exciting features: not only practical, evidence-based education, but also our speakers, who we are proud to say are the highest quality we've ever had and will include several insightful and entertaiing presentations.

 Visit the 2014 ASIPP Annual Meeting Website for more details

Payers Probe Ways to Help Curb Risky Prescribing

A Massachusetts physician found himself in the headlines in 2005 when his license was suspended after evidence emerged that he had prescribed about one-third of the state's 922,985 OxyContin prescriptions in the previous year. Later convicted of drug dealing and Medicare fraud, the man remains a familiar example of the public health effect of risky prescribing.

But cases of inappropriate prescribing are often far more subtle. A physician may unwittingly prescribe to a doctor-shopping patient or simply prescribe too frequently without taking appropriate precautions. To help physicians and state officials identify dangerous prescribing patterns, all 50 states have created prescription drug monitoring programs or have legislation calling for the creation of such a program, and a growing body of evidence supports their use.

JAMA

Keep your patients informed and entertained with ASIPP-TV24 in your waiting room

  With ASIPP-TV24 our patients will view TV programming about Interventional Pain Management furnished by the American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians (ASIPP) and video of your practice if you choose. Your waiting room patients will increase their awareness of pain management issues and procedures by watching ASIPP-TV24.

And this relevant and appealing programming will also lessen the perceived wait time for patients and caregivers. ASIPP-TV24 is easy to setup and run. A media player and all of the content, administration, and technical support is handled by ASIPP and it's partner Tanager Productions. Fresh content is downloaded to your office on a regular basis. All of this for a subscription fee as low as $35 per month.

For more information Click Here.

Killing Pain: Benzo 'Boost' Can Be Deadly

Only Michael Moore knew the combination to the safe in his bedroom closet. He had locked up his prescriptions for chronic pain and insomnia so his two young children could not get into them.

As it turned out, it was Moore, 49, who needed the protection.

On Nov. 3, 2012, Moore, a computer analyst from Milwaukee who had suffered a serious knee injury years earlier, died of an accidental overdose. When police opened the safe they found hundreds of two types of prescription pills: opioids and benzodiazepines.

Medpage Today

Killing Pain: Script by Script

Primary care doctors wrote about 53 million benzodiazepine prescriptions in 2013, roughly four times the number written by psychiatrists, a group that penned 13 million benzo scripts.

Nurse practitioners and physician assistants were close behind with 11 million prescriptions for the drugs, according to data obtained by MedPage Today and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

In 2013, non-doctors wrote 30 million opioid prescriptions, compared with 92 million written by primary care doctors that year, according to data provided by IMS Health, a drug market research firm.

MedPage Today

Schumer to HHS: Ditch Zohydro

During a Monday press briefing, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) called on Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to overturn the FDA's approval of Zohydro, a potent hydrocodone-only opioid approved last October.

Schumer joins Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and David Vitter (R-La.), who last week raised concerns about the drug and the way it was approved. In a letter to the dean of the medical school at the University of Rochester Manchin and Vitter voiced concerns about the school's involvement in a potential pay-to-play that they allege could be tied to Zohydro's approval.

In November, attorneys general from 28 states asked the FDA to reconsider its approval decision. And last week, more than 40 people -- including doctors and advocacy groups -- reinforced that message with their own letter to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, MD, asking her to pull the drug from the market.

MedPage Today

Pregnant Women On Opioids: The Pain Medicine News Report

One in seven pregnant women has been prescribed an opioid prescription for pain at some point during her pregnancy, researchers report.

"I Felt Like an Old Fool": A pain management specialist revisits the painful experience of being investigated by a state medical board.

It may be possible to predict which patients with chronic pain will respond to a medical detoxification program, according to a new study.

The National Pain Foundation is back, four years after merging with the American Pain Foundation, which ceased to exist in 2012.

MedPage Today

Blog: Patient's view on Reforming the Physician Fee-for-Service Payment System

Virtually all serious proposals for health care cost containment include reforming the fee-for-service payment system. Last fall's bipartisan proposal to fix Medicare's sustainable growth rate included provisions to reward physicians for providing high-value rather than high-volume care. Ostensibly, realigning physicians' financial incentives would lead to higher quality, better coordinated, and more appropriate care.

But would patients necessarily be aware that their physicians are being paid differently? And would they even care? A new research report from Public Agenda and the Kettering Foundation suggests that consumers could play a role in advancing payment reform. But in order to work through the trade-offs of changing the system, employers and payers must help members of the public understand that most reimbursement is currently fee-for-service.

Public Agenda asked a total of 44 insured and uninsured Americans, 40 to 64 years old, to deliberate together in focus groups over the pros and cons of several approaches to cost containment. Participants had some recent contact with the health care system as patients but none were seriously ill. They considered payment reform, price transparency, increased consumer cost-sharing, government price-setting, and expanded access to Medicare, among other approaches.

Health Affairs

CMS launches ICD-10 website for small physician practices

ORLANDO - A new resource is available for small practices as they prepare to switch to the ICD-10 coding system.

Officials from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) launched a new website - Road to ICD-10 - to provide a central source of basic information as well as a place to start transitioning to the new code set, which becomes mandatory on Oct. 1.

The site provides fact sheets, training videos, sample codes, and a variety of other resources. It also provides training modules that are specific to certain specialties.

Family Practice