Kaiser Permanente Recommends Brief Screening tool to Mitigate risk of Opioid Abuse

The nation's largest nonprofit health plan recommends Inflexxion's SOAPP® tool

Newton, MA (PRWEB) September 22, 2008 -- Kaiser Permanente's National Pain Management Advisory Group today announced its first recommended practice tool, the Screener and Opioid Assessment for Patients in Pain (SOAPP®). This tool was developed by Inflexxion, Inc., of Newton, MA and is recommended by Kaiser Permanente to assist primary care physicians in improving pain treatment. The Kaiser Permanente network covers eight regions, including 13,000 physicians at 320 hospitals and reaches nearly nine million members nationwide.

Kaiser's National Pain Management Advisory Group is committed to improving care for their members with chronic pain. They also assist providers in making clinical decisions to improve pain management by creating Practice Resources on various issues relevant to the management of chronic pain after reviewing the best evidence available and arriving at recommendations for practice. In their Long-Term Opioid Therapy Practice Resource the group was tasked with recommending a tool which could quantify risk and assist in making follow-up recommendations based on risk level. Four tools were evaluated and SOAPP was selected for recommendation based on scientific validity, reliability, and brevity.

"Chronic non-cancer pain treatment requires a multidisciplinary and multimodal approach, which may include the judicious use of opioid analgesics. Use of the SOAPP tool will assist Kaiser Permanente providers in balancing their goal of improved pain management with the concerns of abuse and diversion of these substances," says Dr. Karen Pantazis, Clinical Lead of the National Pain Management Advisory Group.

"We are very pleased about the Advisory Group's recommendation of SOAPP," says Dr. Simon Budman, President of Inflexxion, Inc. "While SOAPP has been utilized for several years by practitioners, Kaiser's recommendation represents a significant step toward widespread adoption of SOAPP as an industry standard."

Validation of the SOAPP tool was published in the journal Pain, "Validation of a screener and opioid assessment measure for patients with chronic pain" in 2004.

Inflexxion's SOAPP tool was developed with support from the National Institutes of Health and an unrestricted educational grant from Endo Pharmaceuticals. The SOAPP tool is available for download at www.painedu.org.

About Inflexxion®, Inc.
Inflexxion develops clinically tested online programs for health issues such as substance abuse and addiction, pharmaceutical risk management, student health, and pain management, among others. These innovative prevention, intervention, and education programs help health professionals, pharmaceutical firms, and biotechnology companies deliver quality care to diverse populations. Inflexxion is based in Newton, MA.

###