Optimal Management of Pain in Hospitalized Patients - Opioid Tolerant Populations.

Pain is a symptom that drives hospital admissions, and pain management is required by most patients during their hospital stay. Further, the use of medications such as opioids can lead to upward-spiraling doses, especially among chronic pain patients whose resource utilization rates are high. Many initiatives aim to reduce the costs of these "high-resource utilizing" patients. One exciting aspect of improving the management of pain is that this may help prevent patients from ever becoming high-cost in the first place. The purpose of this study is to examine the impacts of an early and sustained intervention pathway, in comparison to the current standard of care, for the treatment of pain in opioid tolerant patients. It is hypothesized that patients randomized to the intervention pathway, in comparison to the control, will lead to decreased costs of care, a reduction in opioid usage within 3 and 6 months, and decrease in hospital readmission rates.