Clinical Decision Support (CDS) for Chronic Pain Management

Prescription opioid pain medication overuse, misuse, and abuse have been a significant contributing factor in the opioid epidemic. The goal of this project is to develop, implement, disseminate, and evaluate clinical decision support (CDS) tools for both patients and clinicians in the management of chronic pain. The CDS tools are intended to be interoperable and publicly-shareable, and will be designed to meet the needs of patients and clinicians through both patient-facing and clinician-facing channels and formats. The development and deployment of CDS tools designed to optimize opioid dose reduction is intended to support primary care physicians who are not pain-management specialists as they care for patients who are at high risk of harm from opioids. This goal will be achieved through the design, development, implementation, and evaluation of a clinician-facing CDS tool for chronic pain management that optimize presentation of patient data and evidence-based guidelines to support opioid tapering. The clinician-facing CDS tool will help non-pain specialists detect patients at high risk of harm from opioids, provide personalized evidence-based guidelines to support opioid tapering, optimize the presentation of patient data, and reduce unnecessary variation in clinical practice. The clinician-facing CDS tool will also assist non-pain specialists in determining if an opioid taper is necessary for a specific patient, aid in performing the taper, and aid in providing follow-up and support during the taper. The clinician-facing CDS tools are meant to accomplish three goals: (1) better monitor the patient’s functional pain and opioid use, (2) visualize patient data, and (3) incorporate guidelines for prescribing and tapering opioids for chronic pain. The patient-facing CDS tool will be used to help patients at high-risk of harm from opioids track and manage chronic pain and daily function to support reduced opioid use. This goal will be achieved through the design, development, implementation, and evaluation of a CDS tool that facilitates continued patient provider engagement. This patient-facing CDS tool will deliver support in ways that enhance patient activation, education and engagement, and collaborative decisions and actions between patients and their care teams. The patient-facing CDS tool should enhance the quality of clinical discussion between healthcare providers and patients by allowing for continued patient engagement outside of the clinical setting.

The latest form for Clinical Decision Support (CDS) for Chronic Pain Management expires 2023-12-31 and can be found here.

Attachment 1 -- Evaluation Provider Survey

Federal Enterprise Architecture: Health - Health Care Services

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