Over the past 30 years, patient navigation (PN) has emerged as a promising supplement to the traditional care model, offering providers new routes to address the social, financial, and logistical barriers to care faced by vulnerable populations in the health care setting.1 By enlisting navigators to guide patients throughout their treatment journey, PN programs have shown great promise as a cost-effective mechanism to reduce time to treatment, provider burden, and excessive health care utilization while bolstering patient satisfaction, treatment management, and preventative health care.2,3,4,5

PN infrastructure is most efficient in the oncology space, where the approach was first piloted in the 1990s. Providers have since launched PN models across a variety of indications, including heart failure, dementia, diabetes, epilepsy, and chronic kidney disease, with promising proof of concept in each case.6,7 The treatment of spine disease presents similarly pressing barriers to care and well-documented disparities in care access, outcomes, and patient experience.8,9,10 However, little work has been established to investigate the promise of patient navigation within this space.

In the US, 1.5 million instrumented spinal procedures are performed annually (AQ: Awkward not sure whether instrumented procedures include lumbar surgeries or not. Please clarify), with high rates of postoperative emotional distress, prolonged pain, and long-term opioid use.11,12 In light of this unmet need for more patient-centric spinal care, the authors present a case for patient navigation for spine patients. In the first section, two key considerations when establishing a patient navigation program, disease state and program structure, will be discussed:

• Applicability, specifically, to the spine field will be addressed
• In addition, the authors’ experiences piloting a social support-oriented spine surgery patient navigation program.