National Congress on Improving Care of Low Back Pain

The Institute for Healthcare Improvement will host a National Congress on Improving Care of Low Back Pain patients, February 18-19th in St. Louis, Missouri. The congress will report on the work of 23 health care organizations that participated in a year long national collaboration. The collaborative, chaired by Richard Deyo, MD, MPH, is part of the Institute for Healthcare "improvement's breakthrough series," which brings together teams of health care providers from around the country to make significant and rapid improvements in selected clinical and operational areas.

Both the clinical leadership of the collaborative and the team members from participating organizations brought a multidisciplinary approach to the work, with representatives from chiropractic, primary care and family medicine, neurosurgery and orthopedics. Each organization participating in the collaborative formulated its own goals in selected areas including working with providers and employers to:

• accelerate a patient's return to normal activity;


• reduce inappropriate use of unproven therapies and invasive procedures while improving patient self-management;


• improve diagnostic evaluation such as reducing inappropriate imaging within the first 4-6 weeks of an acute episode;

The congress will feature plenary presentations and breakout sessions that focus on five key areas:

• strengthening primary care physician's ability to diagnose and treat low back pain;


• improving patient's functional status and satisfaction;


• utilizing imaging and diagnostic tests appropriately;


• using appropriate referrals to surgeons and specialists;


• accelerating employee's return to work.

There will also be a day long post-congress interactive workshop to train nonsurgical health care professionals as medical spine specialists.

The National Congress is an action-oriented program, focusing on providing attendees the tools they need to make immediate changes in the way low back pain is managed within their health care system. Attendees will hear the experiences of organizations in the breakthrough series, and from other practitioners across the country whom have succeeded in improving care for low back pain.

Participants in the interactive workshop will learn to:

• identify specific changes that have proven most effective in leading to breakthrough improvements in the care of low back pain;


• recognize and handle issues and obstacles;


• implement simple and effective ways of collecting data that do not require major resources or sophisticated information systems;


• use a simple model for improvement to organize an organization's resources and energies to making change;


• analyze and compare how other organizations have made improvements.

The faculty include:

Collaborative Chair:
Richard Deyo, MD, MPH

Professor of Medicine and Director, RWJ Clinical Scholars Program Center for Cost and Outcomes Research University of Washington School of Medicine Seattle, WA

Collaborative Director:
Marie Schall, MA
Institute for Healthcare Improvement
Moorestown, NJ

Donald Berwick, MD, MPP
President and Chief Executive Officer
Institute for Healthcare Improvement
Boston, MA

Tim Carey, MD
Assistant Professor of Medicine
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC

Daniel Cherkin, PhD
Research Associate Professor,
Center for Health Studies Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound
Seattle, WA Alan Jette, PT, PhD
Dean, Sargent College
Boston University
Boston, MA

Ferdy Massimino, MD, MPH
Coordinator of Guideline Development and Clinical Education
Kaiser Permanente Oakland
Oakland, CA Barry Miller, MD
Orthopedics
Kaiser Hospital, San Jose
San Jose, CA

Robert Mootz, DC
Associate Medical Director
Office of the Medical Director
Department of Labor and Industries
Olympia, WA

Jeffrey Susman, MD
Assistant Dean/Medical Director
University of Nebraska Medical Center
Omaha, NE

John R. Thornbury, MD
Professor Emeritus of Radiology
University of Wisconsin - Madison
Castle Rock, CO

James Weinstein, DO, MS
Director, Surgical Outcomes Assessment Program
Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences
Dartmouth Medical School
Hanover, NH

To receive a registration form for the Improving Care of Low Back Pain National Congress, please contact:

Institute for Healthcare Improvement
135 Francis Street
Boston, MA 02215
617-754-4800