PAIN-OUT is a research project designed to develop effective, evidence-based approaches to improve care of pain in patients after surgery (www.pain-out.eu). Launched in January 2009, with four-year funding from the European Commission’s (EC) 7th Framework Program, PAIN-OUT involves 17 clinical and research partners in 9 European countries. PAIN-OUT is creating an Acute Pain Registry and developing tools for data collection, feedback and decision support. It will provide the medical community with a unique, web-based, user-friendly system to improve treatment of patients with postoperative pain.
PAIN-OUT will feature three principal functions: Feedback and benchmarking system which provides participating sites with continuously updating patient data and analyses about the quality of care they currently provide compared to their performance in the past and that of other participating institutions. This allows identification of ‘best clinical practice’; Clinical Decision Support System for Post-Operative Pain, which responds to queries made by physicians for advice regarding treatment of individual patients; Knowledge Library which provides clinicians with easily accessible and updated, summaries of evidence-based recommendations tailored to specific post-operative situations. PAIN-OUT relies on experience gained from the the German Post-operative Pain Registry (QUIPS), which tracks postoperative outcomes and related data, operating for the last 6 years, in over 130 German hospitals, with over 150,000 records.