Interdisciplinary multimodal pain treatment (IMPT) represents an effective treatment option for chronic pain. Alas, it is also a very expensive and personnel-intensive intervention. Although IMPT could be accomplished in a resource-saving day hospital setting, there is no general insurance coverage for it and thus, IMPT is usually conducted in an in-patient setting. In this study, members of the CRC compared the differences in treatment outcome between, an otherwise identical, ambulatory and in-patient IMPT, at the back pain center Essen, in a matched cohort. Our data provide novel insights by suggesting at least equal effectiveness of ambulatory compared with in-patient IMPT for patients with chronic back pain. Moreover, ambulatory treatment seemed partly superior, with greater improvements in pain-related disability 3 months and in pain intensity 6 months post treatment. This advantage could have been driven by a larger gain in pain-related self-efficacy, which was already present, directly post-treatment for ambulatory patients. Read the english publication led by Dustin Maser and Ulrike Bingel in the journal Pain here.