Over the past 25 years, we’ve seen a dramatic shift in how patients’ pain has been assessed and treated. The drive to capture pain as a vital sign drew attention to the need for better control of patients’ pain. The coincident release and aggressive marketing of new types of opioid pain medications dramatically increased opioid use. This tragically led to an epidemic of overdoses and opioid use disorder. The pendulum has now swung back towards a more conservative approach to therapy. This also led to a realization that a more nuanced approach to assessing pain is critical: the many biopsychosocial factors that contribute to a patient’s experience of pain make distilling it down to a single number unrealistic.
In this new era of pain assessment and management, good performance measures are needed in order to benchmark how physicians, medical groups, and health plans perform, and to track improvements. To that end, the Performance Measurement Committee (PMC) of the American College of Physicians (ACP) recently undertook an evaluationopens in a new tab or window of existing performance measures in pain management, and made a recommendation for a proposed measure concept that we feel would be helpful in moving patient care forward in this arena.
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