August 23, 2021: BeatPain Utah Takes Pragmatic Research to New Frontiers

BeatPain Utah, an NIH Collaboratory Trial, is studying real-world implementation of a telehealth physical therapy strategy for patients with chronic back pain. Dr. Julie Fritz, the principal investigator of BeatPain Utah, discussed the study in a Zoom-based interview after the NIH Collaboratory’s annual steering committee meeting.

“[BeatPain Utah] is focused on overcoming access barriers and providing nonpharmacologic options for individuals in our state and in under-resourced communities who have chronic back pain,” said Fritz, who is a distinguished professor of physical therapy and athletic training and the associate dean for research at the University of Utah College of Health.

The project is part of the NIH HEAL Initiative, which aims to reduce reliance on prescription opioid medications.

View the full video.

Fritz highlighted the project’s partnerships with federally qualified health centers throughout the state of Utah. “Some are in urban areas serving under-resourced communities,” she said, “and others, given the geography of Utah, are in very rural and remote communities where access to specialists and allied health professionals is particularly limited.” The communities also include a significant number of patients who are Hispanic or Latino and communicate primarily in Spanish.

When asked why a pragmatic clinical trial was the best approach for BeatPain Utah, Fritz noted the urgency of the need for alternative pain management strategies, especially in low-resource populations.

“Accelerating the real-world applicability of our research is particularly critical in this area of clinical research,” Fritz said. “So for us, in addressing the needs of populations that need resources—and they need them now—a pragmatic trial that focuses on real-world solutions was a particularly attractive option,” she said.

On being part of the NIH Collaboratory, Fritz said, “So many of the things that we encounter, someone’s already dealt with or is currently working on. It’s just invaluable to have those colleagues and professionals who are trying similar aims to what we’re doing. Being part of this Collaboratory has been of tremendous value for our project.”

View the full video.

BeatPain Utah is supported by the NIH through the NIH HEAL Initiative under a grant from the National Institute of Nursing Research and receives logistical and technical support from the PRISM Resource Coordinating Center.

Screen shot of interview with Dr. Julie Fritz

April 27, 2020: NIH Announces Supplemental Funding Opportunity for Research on Stigma in Pain Management, Opioid Use, and Opioid Use Disorder

The NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, with other NIH Institutes, Centers, and Offices, has issued a notice of special interest calling for research on stigma in the context of chronic pain management and opioid use or opioid use disorder. The NIH will support administrative supplements to current awards and cooperative agreements under the Helping to End Addiction Long Term (HEAL) Initiative. A total of up to $3.5 million is available for the supplemental awards. Applications will be accepted through May 29, 2020.

This funding opportunity will give high priority to projects that analyze strategies to reduce stigma, discrimination, and prejudice related to chronic pain management and/or opioid use disorder; and to projects that use existing psychometrically validated tools to measure stigma (or that support the development of new measurement tools, if there is compelling rationale). Specific areas of interest include:

  • The impact of internalized and anticipated stigma on prevention, management, treatment, and recovery.
  • Prejudice by care providers that undermine treatment and health-related quality of life.
  • Strategies to address stigma among healthcare providers, workplace colleagues, emergency responders, family and friends, and others.
  • Strategies to address internalized stigma.
  • The adaption and application of existing theories of health-related stigma to chronic pain and/or opioid use disorder in reducing stigma.
  • Analyses of combinations of approaches that are known to reduce discrimination and prejudice.
  • Approaches to build resilience to discrimination and prejudice.
  • First-stage development of multicomponent approaches that could be expanded and implemented for large-scale multicomponent research projects.

Application and submission information is available in the full notice of special interest.

November 20, 2018: Upcoming NIH Funding Opportunity Announcements for Pragmatic Trials Address the Opioid Crisis

The NIH has announced an intent to publish new funding opportunity announcements (FOAs) for 5 or more embedded pragmatic clinical trials that address pain management and the opioid crisis. These projects will become part of the NIH Health Care Systems Research Collaboratory as phased UG3/UH3 cooperative research. Both FOAs will be published in early December with applications due as early as February 2019.

The two notices are:

The announcements are part of the NIH Heal (Helping to End Addiction Long-term) Initiative, which was created in April 2018 in an effort to speed scientific solutions for addressing the national opioid public health crisis.

April 9, 2018: PPACT Study Design Paper Published

Congratulations to Dr. Lynn DeBar and the investigators of the Collaborative Care for Chronic Pain in Primary Care pragmatic trial for recently publishing their study design paper. One of the NIH Collaboratory Trials, the trial is designed to test whether a primary care–based behavioral intervention the Pain Program for Active Coping and Training (PPACT)—will provide a “more effective, safer, and more satisfactory alternative to opioid-based chronic pain treatment” than usual care for patients on chronic opioid treatment (Debar et al 2018). Learn more about this innovative trial in the article in Contemporary Clinical Trials. You can also download a trial snapshot.

Full Citation: DeBar L, Benes L, Bonifay A, et al. Interdisciplinary team-based care for patients with chronic pain on long-term opioid treatment in primary care (PPACT) – Protocol for a pragmatic cluster randomized trial. Contemporary Clinical Trials. 2018;67:91-99. doi:10.1016/j.cct.2018.02.015