HARTFORD – Insurance giant The Hartford has announced that it is extending a partnership with Yale School of Medicine that aims to help tackle the opioid crisis by providing newly developed training on addiction, pain management and stigma to medical providers who treat injured workers.
A $200,000 “unrestricted gift” this year to Yale Medicine from The Hartford, which is one of the country’s largest providers of workers’ compensation and disability insurance, will support the delivery of the training to more medical professionals. The new allocation supplements a $150,000 donation that The Hartford announced last year in support of the initiative’s pilot, whose results have been lauded by officials at the company and Yale Medicine.
“We have learned and we will continue to learn as we think about how we want to expand this to other parts of the state and the country,” The Hartford Chief Executive Officer and Chairman Christopher Swift said in an interview.
Dr. David Fiellin and Dr. Jeanette Tetrault led the Yale Program in Addiction Medicine team that developed the new curriculum, which strives to help clinicians better understand opioids and work-related injuries, identify and treat acute and chronic pain and assess disorders involving opioid use and other substances among injured workers.
Supported by the new curriculum, the Yale PAM team conducted in June an in-depth virtual training session for 25 clinicians, most of whom are based in Connecticut. The clinicians’ learning was highlighted in them scoring an average an 88 percent on post-training assessments.
In the coming year, the Yale PAM team plans to refine and update the curriculum based on pilot participants’ feedback, conduct additional virtual and in-person training sessions and develop “train-the-trainer” resources so that more instructors can conduct the training.