Dr. Amol Soin and the Ohio Pain Clinic to patients at the heart of everything they do
By Corinne Minard
Dr. Amol Soin, medical director of the Centerville-based Ohio Pain Clinic—this year’s winner of Best Physician Group in Ohio Business magazine’s annual Best in Ohio Business awards—credits his practice’s success with their commitment to going the extra mile.
“What I tell my staff when we have our onboarding meetings is that what we are putting the patient experience on the very top of our value pyramid. Everything we do, we want to maximize that experience for them,” he says.
Soin, who grew up in the area and attended Beavercreek High School, first became interested in pain medicine while in medical school. It was a brand-new specialty and he wanted to be at the forefront of a new field. He also saw that people were having issues managing pain in Dayton.
“Montgomery County became one of the worst in terms of opioid deaths per capita from drug overdoses, a lot of times related to pain. When I opened my clinic, my philosophy really from the get-go, and this was back in 2007, so when the opioid crisis was just starting to be recognized, was to manage pain without relying on narcotics or taking painkillers. And so that was sort of my philosophy from the beginning,” says Soin.
Patients come to see Soin and his team for problems like lower back pain, neck pain, joint pain and even headaches. No matter the pain, they take a holistic approach to relieving it. In addition to physical therapy, exercise, diet and lifestyles changes, Soin offers treatments like nerve blocks.
“If you’re having chronic pain in an area, if we can find a nerve that’s causing your pain, under X-ray guidance, I can inject medicine around that nerve to block it from firing a pain signal, which could take your pain away,” says Soin.
For even more long-term relief, Soin also performs nerve ablations, which can burn or cauterize a nerve, causing it to stop firing pain signals.
“That does not do permanent damage to the nerve, but it does knock the pain out for about a year or so. And then if the pain comes back, we can just repeat it continuously and there’s no medicines involved or anything and you actually get really good pain relief from it,” adds Soin.
Another unique aspect to the Ohio Pain Clinic is its onsite research lab. About 2,000 square feet of the practice’s 18,000-square-foot facility is dedicated to a freestanding research lab.
“There are new types of nerve blocks, and nerve stimulation technologies we’re working on there. What that allows us to do is be on the very forefront of medicine, especially for pain. All this stuff out of that lab is non-addicting non-sedating, and we do clinical trial work there, too. So, patients will have the opportunity to participate in those trials if they wish or want, which allows them to get some of these new techniques really rapidly,” says Soin.
This dedication to patients even translates to the appointment process. A referral is not necessary, and patients can book their appointment online.
“If you maximize that patient experience, those patients are going to go off and tell a hundred people,” he says. “I feel like because we spend so much time on culture of maximizing the experience, it kind of fosters that whole groundswell of support that we have. I feel like that’s our biggest key to success.”