Introduction: Neil Jobalia, MD

I'm an anesthesiologist and pain specialist primarily practicing in private practice, I'm in solo practice. I use a large amount of opioids in my practice because they're effective and I think it's a tremendous tool to have available in the fight against pain. As far as my practice and its relationship to diversion, of course it's a major fear of mine when I'm prescribing the medications that I prescribe.

I guess in my experience what I would say is that I think coordination is the key to trying to diminish diversion, referring back to what Dr. Jurenson was talking about, and being able to appropriately prescribe opioids to patients that need them. And I mean coordination between both physicians and law enforcement as well as among pharmacists, other health care providers, all kind of working together.

I think one of the things I've thought about is using technology to really aid in that. My main goal however is to be able to provide adequate care of pain which is inadequately treated, as has been stated earlier. And I think that coordination would help me to be able to prescribe more freely and less fearfully, and also more appropriately treat the patients that I see suffering.