Thanks to a newly funded project, investigators will analyze treatment records of veterans with chronic pain with the goal of improving the quality of pain management at the Veterans Health Administration.
Robert Kerns, PhD, professor of psychiatry, of neurology, and of psychology at Yale, is the project's principal investigator. Kerns has a joint appointment at the Veterans Affairs Connecticut Healthcare System (VACHS) and is director of the Pain Research, Informatics, Multi-morbidities, and Education (PRIME) Center based at VACHS. Kerns is joined by two co-principal investigators—Cynthia Brandt, MD, professor of emergency medicine at Yale and director of the informatics core at the VA PRIME Center, and Steven Luther, PhD of the James Haley Veterans Hospital in Tampa, Fla.
The team will evaluate the implementation of the Veterans Health Administration's innovative stepped care model of pain management which begins with lower intensity, lower cost, and less invasive treatments and, if necessary, escalates care to more intensive or complex interventions. The team will consider pain assessment, treatments (including evidence-based complementary health approaches), reassessment of outcomes, and patient education.
Efforts to improve and evaluate pain management models have been limited by a lack of reliable quality indicators and metrics. Specifically, it is difficult to capture the breadth of treatments and aspects of integrated care that are not currently tracked by codes in electronic health records (EHR). The funded project will utilize natural language processing and machine learning to automate the collection of pertinent data from EHR.
This innovative approach to identifying and tracking key dimensions of healthcare quality may be applicable to the evaluation and improvement of other complex health problems.
The $2.45 million, five-year project has been awarded funds by both the National Institute of Health's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The grant was announced in late September as part of an initiative to improve nondrug approaches to pain and related conditions among military personnel, veterans, and their families.