Sharing the Decision, Sharing the Data: Interoperable Clinical Decision Support Tool for Chronic Pain Management

Patient-centered chronic pain care

The U.S. opioid crisis is an ongoing public health epidemic, and millions of Americans suffer from chronic pain. Prescription of opioids has been under scrutiny in recent years to control inappropriate prescribing. While opioids can be part of an appropriate treatment plan for people with chronic pain, Drs. Christopher Harle and Ramzi Salloum believe that primary care providers delivering the right treatment for patients should involve shared decision making and could benefit from implementing tools that facilitate this process.

Improving interoperability to improve chronic pain care

With a goal to scale and disseminate interoperable CDS, the research team will use existing CDS tools for chronic pain treatment—MyPAIN and PainManager—in selected clinics at University of Florida Health and the OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium. The implementation will be tailored to address the individual workflows of the clinic along with the needs of the population the clinics serve. MyPAIN and PainManager will aid clinicians in collaboratively addressing chronic pain with their patients by allowing them to share their understanding of the patient’s condition, discuss individual patient goals, and come together with patients to make decisions about what care and treatment looks like going forward.

“We will work to bring patients and clinicians closer together to share their experiences, share patient-reported outcomes, share their constraints and their goals. I’m very hopeful those kinds of tools will advance patient-centered treatments, equitable care, and equitable health outcomes.”
- Dr. Christopher Harle

Improving medical and technological outcomes The research team expects that tailored CDS implementation support will increase MyPAIN and PainManager’s adoption and facilitate greater shared decision making among clinicians treating patients with chronic pain. It is expected that these efforts will also lead to improved patient outcomes and positive results in chronic pain management. Beyond pain management, this research will provide significant advancement in scaling and adoption strategies for interoperable CDS by examining and evaluating the implementation of MyPAIN and PainManager in different clinical settings and across different types of EHRs.