Measuring Chronic Pain Impact: Measurement Enhancement for Chronic Pain

Many complementary and integrative health approaches have been shown to be effective for chronic pain and included in guidelines. This evidence of effectiveness is built on hundreds of studies representing millions of research dollars, and the ability to analyze and better compare results across these studies is essential to obtain the full value of this investment. However, useful across-study comparisons which would allow better understanding and targeting of these interventions are hampered by at least two challenges: the lack of common outcome measures and the inability to meaningfully stratify or classify patients. The first two Aims of this study each address one of these two challenges. The last Aim takes advantage of this study to further test the viability of MTurk as a data collection platform. Specific Aim 1 addresses the lack of common outcome measures. This Aim is to develop and evaluate links or crosswalks between the PROMIS-29 and other common (legacy) measures used for chronic pain so that the results of studies using different measures can be compared. Our hypothesis here is that we will be able to create some sort of linkage between PROMIS and legacy measures that will allow for each pair estimates of one to be made from the other. Specific Aim 2 addresses the inability to meaningfully stratify or subclassify chronic pain patients. This Aim is to evaluate and refine the chronic pain impact stratification scheme (ISS) proposes by the NIH Research Task Force on chronic low back pain, which is based on 9 PROMIS-29 items. Our hypothesis here is that the ISS can be refined so that it can identify subgroups of chronic pain patients with different levels of morbidity and different needs for treatment. Specific Aim 3 addresses the potential for more efficient data collection using the MTurk platform. This Aim is to evaluate MTurk as a cost- and time-efficient method to collect quality data on individuals with chronic pain. Our hypothesis here is that w