NIH within HHS www.hhs.gov, will lead the Department of Defense (DOD) www.defense.gov, and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) www.va.gov to work together on a multi-component research partnership project to focus on using nondrug approaches to manage pain for service members and veterans.
Eventually, twelve research projects totaling about $81 million over six years pending available funds, will focus on developing, implementing, and testing cost-effective, large-scale, real world research on non-drug approaches for pain management and related conditions in military and veteran healthcare delivery organizations.
Today, seven of the twelve projects have been awarded by HHS/NIH. The remaining five will be announced by DOD and the VA in the coming months. The five HHS/NIH awards are going to Yale University www.yale.edu, University of Utah www.utah.edu, Northern California Institute for Research and Education https://www.ncire.org, Palmer College of Chiropractic https://www.palmer.edu, and Duke University www.duke.edu.
The project involving Robert Kerns, PhD at Yale University and his team in collaboration with their VA, DOD, and Yale partners are going to work towards establishing the “Pain Management Collaboratory Coordinating Center”.
The Center will provide national leadership and serve as a national resource for developing and refining innovative tools, best practices, and other resources. These tools will be used to conduct high impact pragmatic clinical trials so that nondrug approaches for pain management and other comorbid conditions in the veteran and military healthcare systems can be developed. The team will use their expertise in pain management, EHRs, and data systems to design and coordinate multi-site real world trials.
HHS/NIH co funders for the research include the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) https://nccih.nih.gov, Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH) https://orwh.od.nih.gov, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) www.ninds.nih.gov, and Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) https://obssr.od.nih.gov.
DOD is funding the research initiative through their Clinical and Rehabilitative Medicine Research Program https://crmrp.amedd.army.mil, and the Military Operational Medicine Research Program https://momrp.amedd.army.mil. The VA is providing their funding through the VA’s Office of Research and Development www.research.va.gov.