In Conversation: Sentry Insurance’s Jean Feldman on Chronic Pain Treatment and the Positive Role Behavioral Health Can Play

Sentry Insurance has been looking at the link between chronic pain and behavioral conditions, delving deep into its own closed claims to extract useable data points.

At RISKWORLD 2024, Jean Feldman, senior director of managed care at Sentry Insurance, sat down with Risk & Insurance’s Abi Potter Clough to share some of those insights.

“There’s a propensity for a small number of claims to increase the costs dramatically,” Feldman explained.

“When you look at chronic pain and chronic pain with medications, and then also the behavioral psychosocial aspects that impede return to work or recovery, we have started three different models,” she said. “We have found that those claims tend to cost 5.6 times the average amount of regular claims.”

Feldman noted that it will be a journey to show employers the benefits of treating behavioral factors alongside physical injury in workers’ compensation, but “you have to spend time with the employers to help educate them of why this is making a difference … We can’t just keep focusing on the medical without making sure we’re taking care of the whole person.”

Here’s our conversation with Feldman in full: