Reimagining Pain Management: Meet Amol Soin MHCDS’21

By Betsy Vereckey

A lifelong Ohioan, Dr. Amol Soin lives in Montgomery County, a part of the state that happens to have the highest number of deaths per capita due to the opioid crisis.

“Everyone has been touched by addiction here, and the thing that we need more than anything is to prevent addiction from happening,” he says. “We need better tools in our toolbox to treat pain without relying on addicting painkillers.”

As the medical director of the Ohio Pain Clinic in Centerville, Ohio, Soin is helping rethink pain management with the help of electrical stimulation, meditation, talk therapy, nutrition, and good old-fashioned sleep.

“One of the biggest reasons I went into pain management was because I wanted to go into a field that was new and had a lot of opportunity for discovery,” Soin says. “We know a lot about the heart and liver and kidneys, but pain didn’t officially become a medical specialty until after I graduated med school.”

The first physician in his family, Soin earned his medical degree from the University of Akron and completed a pain management fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic. A few years ago, he decided to enroll in Tuck’s MHCDS program to record more synergies in his expanding health care practice, which currently includes a surgery center and a network of pain clinics. Tuck professor Rob Shumsky’s Health Care Operations Management course ended up being incredibly valuable when Soin was shifting his practice to a telemedicine format during the pandemic. Within two weeks of the end of the course, Soin’s clinics were able to decrease patient wait times.

Says Soin, “That's one of the beauties of the Dartmouth education—I felt like professors were really willing to talk about stuff that may not have necessarily been within the scope of the class. And not only that, they were willing to open it up to the class so that all the students could contribute to finding a solution. It was an awesome experience.”

Soin has a curious mind and thrives on innovation. In addition to his medical practice, he has a passion for accumulating patents and estimates that he has around 70 of them. Among his inventions: a spinal cord stimulator that can get pain scores to zero and a gel patch that dries clear when you rub it on your body. He’s also created a drug compound that—when given an hour before bedtime—can stimulate the production of your body’s natural endorphins, “a pretty powerful painkiller and something that’s non-addicting and non-sedating,” he says.

Q&A
›› What I’m watching: Take Care of Maya (Netflix) 
›› Biggest career risk: Opening my own practice. After I graduated, I decided not to work for a hospital and hang up a shingle and just go for it myself. I wanted to have freedom and autonomy to do my own thing.
›› Good leaders... Pay their people well and respect the people around them.
›› Tuck Courses I Still Think About: Rob Shumsky’s Health Care Operations Management course. Vijay Govindarajan’s Three-Box Solution: I actually give a talk every year at the National ASIPP meeting, and I have a picture of his book up there. It allows you to compartmentalize your brain, which is extremely valuable for someone like me who has so many projects going on at once.

In his practice, Soin noticed that there was often an emotional component that accompanied a patient’s pain and that by talking to patients and really listening to them, he could significantly relieve some of their discomfort. Soin wrote up his findings, which were published in a medical journal, and spearheaded a new pain-management model that is currently being rolled out at 13 different hospitals. The approach relies more on human intervention and less on writing opioid prescriptions, particularly for emergency room visits when opioids are most often prescribed. It’s a huge win for doctors and patients alike. 

“If you can get a patient out of pain, you will see the impact of your work immediately—within a week or two, and honestly, it is a very nice feeling to experience that,” he says. “It is incredibly rewarding.”