2015 Health Care Champions Top Doctor: Dr. Benjamin Lampert

A significant change occurred in Dr. Benjamin Lampert’s career 20 years ago.

He was part of developing a medical team for multidisciplinary pain treatments at Mercy Hospital Springfield. Still in use today, Lampert is one of four Mercy physicians specializing in pain management, along with three health psychology specialists, two nurse practitioners, several nurse specialists and three physician assistants.

“The program uses a team approach to diagnose the cause of chronic pain and prescribe the best treatment,” Lampert says. “Treatments include interventions – such as surgery, implanted devices and injections – appropriate medications, behavioral modification techniques and physical therapy.”

As needed, the team also calls on specialists in spine surgery, orthopedics, oncology and primary care.

Lampert is a 30-year veteran in pain management, and in that time, he’s targeted chronic pain using interventional and noninterventional techniques.

He works as a section chairman at the Mercy Center for Pain Management.

“It is gratifying to see others get their lives back – living effectively with reduced chronic pain,” he says.

Lampert takes that team approach to work outside of his own practice.

“I have had open communication with health care providers both within the Mercy system and local health care providers not in our system to try to bring consistent high-quality pain management care to all patients in our region. I am a research investigator in several national mutli-institutional clinical studies, which bring new, cutting-edge treatment options to patients in our region.”

The last year, he’s served as president of the Missouri Board of Registration for the Healing Arts, a group Gov. Jay Nixon appointed Lampert to six years ago. The board exists to protect state residents by assuring high standards of medical care and professional ethics.

To assist the commercial side of medicine, Lampert has served as a principal investigator for clinical research projects, including an implantable stimulator for migraines and high-frequency spinal chord stimulations for back pain. Both of those projects were for Boston Scientific, a medical device manufacturer and marketer that claims 21 million people last year were treated with its products.

“Dr. Lampert has played a key role in helping advance technology and the future of medicine through improving procedures, efficiency and implementing change,” says Wes Layton, a senior territory manager for Boston Scientific in Olathe, Kan. “As a result of his work, Dr. Lampert is considered a key opinion leader among his peers and has helped hundreds of providers and patients in the process.”

Lampert’s works have been published around two dozen times, from a presentation on computer-controlled anesthetic delivery systems at the 77th annual meeting of the Southern Medical Association in Maryland to a piece on neuroaugmentation in the bulletin of the Greene County Medical Society.