RESEARCH METHODOLOGY POSTER PRESENTATION ABSTRACTS
Please note: All posters will be displayed in Salons 10-12.

FRIDAY, 5:45-6:30 PM


Ackerman D, Bolus R, Dennis R, Huang K, Liu C, Mayer E, Naliboff B, Natoli J, Spiegel B.

PROCAIM: a Web-based data collection system to evaluate integrative therapies.

UCLA School of Public Health, Dept. of Epidemiology dackerma@ucla.edu

PURPOSE: In large part the patients treated with mind-body interventions and other complementary and alternative therapies present with conditions that manifest with varying degrees of overlapping pain, affective and functional disturbances. There is a need explore the pathophysiological interactions among stress, emotion, pain and treatment response. The UCLA Center for Neurovisceral Sciences and Women's Health (CNS/WH) has developed a Web-based data system to collect and manage patient symptom and outcome data. The system is called Patient-Reported Outcomes from Complementary, Alternative, and Integrative Medicine (PROCAIM).

METHODS: PROCAIM is an integrated system consisting of a library of standardized questionnaires to collect patient self-reported information about their symptoms, including stress, pain, fatigue, coping skills, and general well-being. The instruments include assessment of quality of life (SF-36), the Patient Health Questionnaire somatic symptom severity scale (PHQ-15), depression and anxiety (Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale), coping skills (Catastrophizing subscale of the Coping Style Questionnaire, early life trauma (Early Trauma Index), current stress (Perceived Stress Scale, Daily Stress Inventory, and Life Orientation Scale), specific symptoms including pain (Brief Pain Inventory), sleep (subscale of the Hamilton Depression Scale), and fatigue (subscale of the SF36). Patients are contacted via e-mail and data are collected at baseline and thereafter at 3-month intervals for one year. Treatment providers record primary and secondary diagnoses, clinical judgment of treatment outcome, and primary treatment modality (e.g., acupuncture, medication type and dose, biofeedback, cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, other forms of therapy, etc.) via a set of highly-branched data collection screens. All data are maintained in a HIPAA-compliant, secure hosting environment.

RESULTS: Results of a pilot trial with volunteers demonstrated that the majority thought PROCAIM was user friendly, elicited important information, and did not take too much time to complete.

CONCLUSIONS: The resulting database represents a common longitudinal data set to evaluate treatments in real-world clinical settings and to explore the pathophysiological basis for overlapping conditions characterized by pain, mood, and functional disturbances. Individual patient data may enhance clinical care by providing treatment providers with more information about their patients than would be obtained in a usual office visit. PROCAIM will be demonstrated at the conference.

 

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