Pain Management

Background

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) awarded CFMC Health Care Quality Improvement Program (HCQIP) funds to study pain management in the acute care hospital setting. The overall objective of the study was to determine if patient perception of postoperative pain management could be predicted from medical record abstraction. If so, a medical record abstraction tool could be used by hospitals to facilitate quality improvement efforts directed at improving patient satisfaction with pain treatment and consequently with their hospital stay.

Implementation

CFMC began collaborating on this project with eight area hospitals in January 2001. First, a database containing information on patient satisfaction with their pain management was obtained by patient questionnaire and quantified by a score. Secondly, a database was created which contained information abstracted from the medical records of the patients surveyed on adherence to pain management guidelines. Analysis was conducted on the two databases to determine if abstracted data elements could predict a patient's perception of pain management. Patient perception, as determined by the patient satisfaction questionnaire, was used as the gold standard in this process. Final analysis was completed on July 31, 2002 and results were published (Sauaia A, Min SJ, Leber C, Erbacher K, Abrams F, Fink R, Parks P. Postoperative Pain Management: Correlation between adherence to treatment guidelines and patient perceptions among elderly patients. JAGS, 53: 274-82, 2005).

Free Materials

CFMC provides the following materials free of charge to providers in the state of Colorado:

Documents and tools related to the Pain Management Project (2002) are also available on the Division of Health Care Policy and Research of the University of Colorado website at http://www.uchsc.edu/hcpr/pain.htm

The Colorado Foundation for Medical Care (CFMC), the Medicare quality improvement organization for Colorado, prepared this material under contract with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The contents do not necessarily reflect CMS Policy.