NIH's Helping to End Addiction Long-termSM Initiative (NIH HEAL Initiative) Clinical Pain Management Common Data Element Program

The Helping to End Addiction Long-term Initiative (NIH HEAL Initiative) is an aggressive trans-NIH effort to speed solutions to stem the national opioid public health crisis, including through improved pain management. Toward this end, the NIH HEAL Initiative launched a common data element (CDE) program to ensure that NIH-funded clinical pain research studies would collect data in a standardized way. NIH HEAL Initiative staff launched a process to determine which pain-related core domains should be assessed by every clinical pain study and what questionnaires are required to ensure that the data is collected uniformly. The process involved multiple literature reviews, and consultation with experts inside and outside of NIH and the investigators conducting studies funded by the initiative. Ultimately, 9 core pain domains, and questionnaires to measure them, were chosen for studies examining acute pain and chronic pain in adults and pediatric populations. These were augmented with dozens of study-specific supplemental questionnaires to enable uniform data collection methods of outcomes outside of the core domains. The selection of core domains will ensure that valuable clinical pain data generated by the initiative is standardized, useable for secondary data analysis, and useful for guiding future research, clinical practice decisions, and policymaking.