Organizations' approach to chronic pain care needs to change

• Key insight: Discover how reframing chronic pain as a standalone condition unlocks more effective benefit strategies.  
• What's at stake: Untreated chronic pain drives absenteeism, presenteeism, disability claims, and rising healthcare expenditures.  
• Forward look: Expect employer strategies to prioritize virtual behavioral pain care and outcome-based vendor metrics.
  Source: Bullets generated by AI with editorial review

While many organizations have boosted their healthcare offerings to meet employees' needs, chronic pain continues to be overlooked and underfunded. 

Nearly one-third of people globally experience chronic pain of some form, according to data from digital mental health platform Calm Health, making it the top reason people seek healthcare. Additionally, chronic pain is the leading cause behind high overtime, increased leave and rising stress and depression levels. Currently, the workforce's efforts in addressing chronic conditions may not be working as well as leaders hope — but a shift in benefit strategy and communication can help. 

"Where we're missing the mark is delivery," said Dr. Eric Anderson, neurologist and chief medical officer of virtual health care company Lin Health. "The diagnosis exists. The evidence exists. But the average patient still bounces between specialists for years, accumulating scans, prescriptions and procedures, without ever being offered the treatment that actually matches their condition." 

Read more: Why migraine support needs to be part of your chronic care strategy

Several systemic barriers limit effective chronic pain care. There are too few pain psychologists to meet demand, reimbursement models favor procedures and prescriptions over the time-intensive behavioral care patients need, and chronic pain often falls between medical and behavioral health systems without clear clinical ownership. At the same time, many physicians receive little training in modern pain neuroscience, leaving patients with the impression that medication, surgery, or simply living with pain are their only options, even though current evidence supports a broader approach to treatment.

"For the employee, untreated or poorly treated chronic pain is corrosive in a way that's hard to overstate — and it doesn't stay in the back or the neck," Anderson said. "It bleeds into sleep, mood, relationships and identity. "

For businesses, according to Anderson, it shows up in every column of the ledger. Chronic pain is one of the most expensive conditions in any employed population with direct costs in the hundreds of billions nationally, but the direct medical spend is arguably the smaller piece.

Read more: How to tackle the chronic condition trifecta

"Presenteeism is the silent one: employees at their desk but operating at 60% because they slept four hours and their pain is at a seven," Anderson said. "Add absenteeism, disability claims and turnover, and pain quietly becomes one of the biggest drags on productivity an employer has."

The encouraging news, according to Anderson, is that addressing much of the issue isn't a heavy lift for leaders. 

Four questions to ask in reviewing benefits

 
Employers reviewing their pain care benefits should focus on four questions: whether employees can easily access evidence-based behavioral pain care, whether virtual delivery removes barriers to treatment, whether vendors report meaningful clinical outcomes rather than engagement metrics, and whether care is coordinated with employees' existing providers instead of functioning as a standalone app. 

Partnering with clinical platforms can also be beneficial. At Lin Health, for example, 92% of the people who completed their program — which offers a virtual, coach-led service program with weekly telehealth appointments — reported improvement and a large share of those who came in on pain medications subsequently came off them entirely.

Read more: Breaking 'the autoimmune career ceiling': How chronic illness care supports workers

"Start by treating chronic pain as its own condition, not a footnote to a MSK or pharmacy line item," Anderson said. "Once you frame it that way, the strategy gets clearer [and] when the right treatment reaches the right patient, the results genuinely look different from what benefits leaders have come to expect." 

When asked about where he wanted to see chronic care support grow, Anderson said he'd like to see it treated the way depression or diabetes are being treated: as a real, defined condition with a standard of care, an expected pathway, and an expectation of recovery, not just management.

"I've watched people who spent ten or 20 years in pain get their lives back in a matter of months," Anderson said. "Once you've seen that enough times, you stop thinking of it as a nice outlier and start thinking of it as the standard everyone deserves. That's the future I'm working toward."