Physicians at Stanford (Calif.) Medicine have developed a computer-based system that uses streams of patient data to provide optimized care for sufferers of long-term pain, according to news from Stanford Medicine.
Long-term pain can alter functions of the nervous, immune and inflammatory systems in ways that can be difficult to track and predict. Long-term pain patients can find it difficult to function socially and often combat mental health issues like depression and anxiety. Evaluating all of these factors is critical to facilitating recovery, but the data can be overwhelming for patients to provide and tedious for physicians to aggregate.
"I used to pay high school students to scan pen-and-paper patient surveys over the weekend...the surveys took 45 minutes for patients to fill out, and we couldn't use the information in real time," said the orchestrator of the data system and professor of anesthesiology at Stanford Medicine, Sean Mackey, MD, PhD.
The system is called the Collaborative Health Outcomes Information Registry. The system adapts the questionnaire as patients fill in information, eliminating extraneous questions throughout the process. It also generates graphs exhibiting the patient's progress in various categories to both physician and patient. Recently patient's genetic information has been added to the database.
CHOIR was developed by Stanford's Division of Pain Management and the Center for Clinical Informatics, and supported by National Institutes of Health and the Redlich Pain Endowment. Dr. Mackey is sharing the open-source software nationwide. Dr. Mackey said that the majority of medical conditions that will challenge clinicians in the future will be chronic conditions, and that making masses of health information provided by patients available to clinicians could be the most effective way to treat the chronically ill.
"This is the future of healthcare," said Dr. Mackey. "What is novel now at Stanford is going to be commonplace in five to 10 years."
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