Evolution of an Implementation-Ready Interprofessional Pain Assessment Reference Model.

Standards to increase consistency of comprehensive pain assessments are important for safety, quality, and analytics activities, including meeting Joint Commission requirements and learning the best management strategies and interventions for the current prescription Opioid epidemic. In this study we describe the development and validation of a Pain Assessment Reference Model ready for implementation on EHR forms and flowsheets. Our process resulted in 5 successive revisions of the reference model, which more than doubled the number of data elements to 47. The organization of the model evolved during validation sessions with panels totaling 48 subject matter experts (SMEs) to include 9 sets of data elements, with one set recommended as a minimal data set. The reference model also evolved when implemented into EHR forms and flowsheets, indicating specifications such as cascading logic that are important to inform secondary use of data.