Why this exists

The information needed to make a good decision about a complex pain patient already exists. It is distributed across an EMR — an electronic medical record — a LIS, or laboratory information system, a pharmacy system and a state monitoring database, none of which was designed to talk to the others. The practical consequence is that the person making a decision sees whichever fragment their own employer bought.

Assembling those fragments is unglamorous work and it is most of what makes the rest of this program possible. ProviderSynch has nothing to return if the underlying systems are not connected.

How it works

• Diagnosis coding from the medical record, including behavioral health comorbidity, which is where the co-occurrence with chronic pain is well established and routinely under-recorded. Behavioral health diagnoses follow the DSM — the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
• Laboratory and toxicology results from the laboratory system, with confirmatory status attached — a presumptive result and a confirmed result should never look alike in a display.
• CCM — chronic care management: coordination of the ongoing care of a patient with multiple long-term conditions, so that the pain treatment plan and the treatment plans for everything else are visible together rather than managed in isolation.
• RPM — remote patient monitoring: physiologic data reported from a device between visits. See the component page.
• RTM — remote therapeutic monitoring: device-reported data on a person’s therapy and function between visits, rather than a point-in-time observation. Where RPM reports physiology, RTM reports how treatment is actually going — adherence, musculoskeletal function, respiratory measures, response to behavioral therapy. For a chronic pain population this is frequently the more informative of the two, because function is the outcome that matters and it is invisible at a six-week appointment.

RTM, RPM and CCM are each recognized clinical service categories with their own documentation requirements. This site describes what they do clinically and for an agency. It publishes no billing codes, payment rates or coverage claims — see what we do and do not do.