Recognising, understanding, and addressing health inequities is fundamentally important to reducing the global burden of persistent pain, as is the consistent, comparable measurement of pain outcomes across studies. EFIC is pleased to announce its endorsement of three consensus-derived initiatives that support standardisation and harmonisation in pain research: the ISSHOOs equity dataset, the IMI-PainCare PROMPT core outcome set, and the INTEGRATE-pain core outcome sets.
ISSHOOs: standardising equity-relevant data collection
The “Identifying Social Factors that Stratify Health Opportunities and Outcomes (ISSHOOs) in Pain Research” project has developed a minimum dataset of equity-relevant items, recommended for inclusion in all human adult pain research. The consensus-derived ISSHOOs recommendations, published in eClinicalMedicine (Karran et al., 2025), provide a globally relevant and adaptable tool to guide the standardised collection of sociodemographic data, a crucial step towards advancing equity considerations in pain research. ISSHOOs ‘Set A’ (the 8-item minimum dataset) and ‘Set B’ (a 30-item optional dataset) are available as downloadable files for REDCap and Qualtrics, along with translations, project details, and links to publications, at www.isshoos.org.
PROMPT: a core outcome set for perioperative pain
Effective perioperative pain management is essential to prevent patient suffering, delayed recovery, chronic postsurgical pain, and long-term opioid use, yet inconsistent use of outcome measures across studies has made evidence synthesis difficult. The IMI-PainCare PROMPT Delphi consensus process, published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia (Pogatzki-Zahn et al., 2025), establishes a core outcome set of patient-reported outcome measures covering pain intensity at rest and during activity, physical function, self-efficacy, and adverse events. Consistent use of this set will help harmonise outcome assessment, improve comparability between studies, and support more patient-centred perioperative pain research.
INTEGRATE-pain: core outcome domains across the pain continuum
Pain remains the leading cause of disability worldwide among adults, yet existing core outcome sets have tended to focus on specific conditions, limiting data harmonisation across the wider field. The INTEGRATE-pain Delphi process, published in eClinicalMedicine (Bova et al., 2023), establishes four separate core outcome sets of domains and subdomains for acute pain, the transition from acute to chronic pain, recurrent/episodic pain, and chronic pain. Domains span aspects of pain, quality of life, and physical function or activity limitations, offering researchers a shared framework across pain categories.
EFIC encourages researchers to adopt these three initiatives to improve data quality, reproducibility, and comparability across the field, ultimately supporting better outcomes for people living with pain.