Acute Interventional Perioperative Pain & Regional Anesthesiology
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Charles B. Luke, MD, MBA
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Our Regional Anesthesiology and Acute Interventional Perioperative Pain Service (AIPPS) delivers 24-hour, high-quality perioperative pain management for UPMC’s surgical/trauma patients using a multidisciplinary approach. AIPPS manages perioperative surgical pain, enhances the surgical patient experience, and uses up-to-date multimodal and regional anesthesia to decrease overall opioid consumption. AIPPS treats patients at UPMC Mercy, Passavant, Presbyterian, Shadyside, and Magee-Womens Hospital and is widely considered one of the largest acute pain services in the country. Due to our physicians’ anatomical knowledge of the body and extensive experience in ultrasound-guided nerve blocks, they can master new techniques quickly. This agility and adjustment to new techniques positions our AIPPS physicians on the cutting edge of acute pain management and uniquely equips them to safely perform nerve blocks and procedures that might be considered challenging by others who have only seen them in textbooks or articles.
Always striving to increase patient safety and satisfaction and quality of care, AIPPS is expanding the use of multimodal and regional anesthesia, with a mission to find and implement ways to improve acute pain care using an evidence-based system approach with regional anesthesia as our cornerstone. Through these initiatives, the service has been able to decrease length of stay, perioperative opioid use, and complications related to opioid use.
AIPPS is training the next generation of acute pain specialists through our Regional Anesthesiology and Acute Pain Medicine Fellowship Program.