While the practice of medicine in any of its diverse forms is about fixing and healing, sometimes part of the process itself needs fixing and healing. That’s where the blend of skills mastered by Greg L. Thompson, MD, president of LifeLinc Anesthesia, make themselves most welcome.
His 20-plus years as a board-certified anesthesiologist include 18 years serving Memphis Anesthesia Group PA (MAG) and Methodist Hospitals of Memphis, which afforded him not only clinical experience but leadership opportunities in the administrative area with Methodist, where he served as president and chief of staff, among other roles.
“When hospitals have issues with their anesthesia group, it’s most commonly due to either a lack of organization or a lack of leadership,” Thompson said. “It’s not so much that they have a lack in quality, but they lack efficiency — and that’s a big problem for a hospital.”
LifeLinc’s role is to restructure the problem practice, using some original practitioners, but also recruiting, as necessary. The process includes updating methodologies and technologies (e.g. electronic health records) to achieve a more cost-efficient operation, and creating teams of MDs and CRNAs (certified registered nurse anesthetists) who work closely together.
“Doctors don’t work well with administrators, and I think that’s one of the keys to LifeLinc’s success. We are actually clinicians,” he said. “When we talk with existing clinicians at the hospital, we can speak their same language. My experience on the administrative side — after years of working that way in Methodist Hospital — helps us to maintain that connection between the hospital administration and the practitioners, which a lot of places tend not to have.”
Thompson, a native Memphian, relocated to Oxford, Miss., in 2011, when he left the multi-facility Methodist system to concentrate on a single hospital (Baptist Memorial Hospital North Mississippi) and surgery center (Oxford Surgery Center), where he still practices.
In 2014, LifeLinc Pain Centers established flagship locations in Springfield, Tenn., and in Germantown, extending the interventional pain care already being provided by LifeLinc Anesthesia in hospitals, ambulatory centers and office-based practices.
Thompson, who joined LifeLinc in July 2015, notes that another center will open soon in middle Tennessee, followed by a fourth in Oxford, hopefully within the next year.
Thompson explained that LifeLinc Pain Centers see only patients referred by a neurosurgeon, neurologist, family practitioner or surgeon, who are unlikely to be prescription shoppers or medication seekers.
The CDC’s new guidelines for opioid prescribing were developed, in fact, to address prescription pain medicine abuse; they aim to reduce the enormous number of narcotic prescriptions.
“Ten years ago,” Thompson pointed out, “national medical organizations and the Joint Commission of Hospital Accreditation were really pushing physicians to treat pain aggressively; they used to call pain ‘the fifth vital sign.’ That was their motto and their message, so physicians responded and treated pain more aggressively.
“Now we’re seeing the flip side, where they’re saying ‘There’s too much pain medicine out there; short-term narcotics are good for short-term acute pain, but should not be prescribed for non-cancer chronic pain.’”
Pushing for ways to manage the chronic pain with very little or no narcotics, the CDC is stressing alternative non-drug methods and multimodal approaches that reduce narcotic use, integrating non-steroids and antidepressants along with various procedures like nerve blocks and implanted spinal cord stimulators.
“The Mid-South is very high in narcotic prescribing by physicians, compared to areas in the Midwest or other areas; we definitely have the most room for improvement,” he said. “Nationally, Tennessee is in the highest category of states with the highest numbers of narcotic prescriptions per capita; Mississippi and Arkansas are in the second-highest category.
“If you look at the way the Mid-South generally practices, probably 90 percent of patients are managed on narcotics, and about 5 to 10 percent on procedures. We’re trying to flip that model so that we can use procedures to alleviate the pain and decrease that percentage on narcotics.
“This is the new approach to pain,” Thompson said. “It’s not about treating the pain, but treating the patient and returning them to their full daily living function.”
(Back pain is cited as the No. 2 reason nationally that people visit the doctor — and the No. 1 cause of lost work hours in the country, impacting not only the sufferers but the economy.)
LifeLinc has added three hospitals in the last six months, and the future is “wide open,” Thompson said. “Cost efficiency and quality emphasis in anesthesia care is really the wave of the future.”
The greatest challenge is going in to change a practice and its patterns. “You find that change is not something that people in general embrace very well … (especially) an established practice that has done something one way for 20 years. But all of medicine is changing,” he points out. “You have to be a lifelong learner if you want to be a good practitioner. I’ll bet 90 percent of what I do today wasn’t being done 10 years ago.”
A graduate of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center's College of Medicine, Thompson completed his residency in anesthesiology at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. He has undergraduate degrees from Southern Methodist University –in both biology and medieval history, a lifelong interest that led him to University College in Oxford, England, where he studied Roman Britain and Medieval Britain.
But it was the few summers he worked shadowing an orthopedic surgeon in Memphis — a family friend — that influenced him to pursue a medical career.
“At the end of the day, it’s intellectually challenging, and you feel like you’re doing something good to help other people — your whole day is not spent on making a profit.”
His leisure interests include golf, reading, studying, traveling and playing bass guitar — sometimes with his five children, who also play instruments.
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