News Feature | March 24, 2014

Pain Treatment Analytics Reduce Costs, Improve Care

Katie Wike

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

Pain Treatment Analytics

Applying analytics to a pain monitoring database could lead to more personalized care and more effective treatments

At the 30th Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Pain Medicine (AAPM), scientists from Stanford introduced the Health Electronic Registry of Outcomes (HERO) system. The system uses algorithms to assess a patient’s condition and assign values to pain contributors. These include pain intensity, how much pain interferes with activities, physical function, fatigue, sleep, mood, and others.

According to Health IT Analytics, “Not only can HERO perform a quick assessment of a patient’s needs, it can also spawn learning systems that would provide clinicians with continuing information about outcomes and crunch the available data to report on the usefulness of certain therapies and treatments. HERO utilizes the NIH Patient Reported Outcome Measurement Information System (PROMIS), a $100 million repository of clinical data.”

"We expect this work will ultimately help clinicians target tailored treatments to a specific patient," Sean Mackey, MD, PhD, president of AAPM said in a press release.  "And we hope this work will help persons suffering from pain get the right treatment that is safe and effective for them to ultimately improve their quality of life."

According to the release, improving patient outcome registries is one of the goals set by the Institute of Medicine in its 2011. The IOM report shows more than 100 million Americans who suffer chronic pain cost hospitals in medical expenses and lost productivity - a loss of up to $635 billion a year. Mackey explains that to meet these goals HERO is able to:

  • support assessment of patients and treatment decision making at the point of care
  • provide for the aggregation of large numbers of patients
  • enable the assessment of the safety and effectiveness of therapies
  • create "learning systems" that would provide clinicians with ongoing information about treatment success or failure