Journal of general internal medicine
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Chronic pain is widely prevalent among Veterans and can have serious negative consequences for functional status and quality of life among other domains. The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) convened a state-of-the-art (SOTA) conference to develop research priorities for advancing the science and clinical practice of non-pharmacological management of chronic musculoskeletal pain. ⋯ Each workgroup, in their respective areas of focus, identified seminal studies capturing the state of the evidence. Herein, we present consensus recommendations ranging from efficacy to effectiveness to implementation/dissemination research depending on the state of the evidence as assessed by participants, including commentary on common elements across workgroups and future areas of innovation in study design, measurement, and outcome ascertainment.
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Clinician bias contributes to healthcare disparities, and the language used to describe a patient may reflect that bias. Although medical records are an integral method of communicating about patients, no studies have evaluated patient records as a means of transmitting bias from one clinician to another. ⋯ Stigmatizing language used in medical records to describe patients can influence subsequent physicians-in-training in terms of their attitudes towards the patient and their medication prescribing behavior. This is an important and overlooked pathway by which bias can be propagated from one clinician to another. Attention to the language used in medical records may help to promote patient-centered care and to reduce healthcare disparities for stigmatized populations.
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Primary care providers (PCPs) face many system- and patient-level challenges in providing multimodal care for patients with complex chronic pain as recommended in some pain management guidelines. Several models have been developed to improve the delivery of multimodal chronic pain care. These models vary in their key components, and work is needed to identify which have the strongest evidence of clinically-important improvements in pain and function. Our objective was to determine which primary care-based multimodal chronic pain care models provide clinically relevant benefits, define key elements of these models, and identify patients who are most likely to benefit. ⋯ Multimodal chronic pain care delivery models coupling decision support with proactive treatment monitoring consistently provide clinically relevant improvement in pain and function. Wider implementation of these models should be accompanied by further evaluation of clinical and implementation effectiveness.
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Expert guidelines recommend non-pharmacologic treatments and non-opioid medications for chronic pain and recommend against initiating long-term opioid therapy (LTOT). ⋯ Facility-level utilization patterns of non-pharmacologic, non-opioid, and opioid treatments for chronic pain are associated with subsequent patient-level initiation of LTOT among veterans with incident chronic pain. Further studies should seek to understand facility-level variation in chronic pain care and to identify facility-level utilization patterns that are associated with improved patient outcomes.
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Despite strong evidence for the effectiveness of non-pharmacological pain treatment modalities (NPMs), little is known about the prevalence or correlates of NPM use. ⋯ Results identified demographic and clinical characteristics among different NPMs, which may indicate differences in veteran treatment preferences or provider referral patterns. Further study of provider referral patterns and veteran treatment preferences is needed to inform interventions to increase NPM utilization. Research is also need to identify demographic and clinical correlates of clinical outcomes related to NPM use.