YSPH Biostatistics Seminar: “Bridging the Gap: From Unstructured Clinic Notes to Standardized Outcomes Data in Veterans Health Administration Pain Care"

NOTE: BIS 525 students are required to attend in person. Others are invited to attend in person, but may also attend via Zoom.

SPEAKER: Brian Coleman, DC, MHS - Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine, Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, and Biostatistics (Health Informatics), Yale University

TITLE: “Bridging the Gap: From Unstructured Clinic Notes to Standardized Outcomes Data in Veterans Health Administration Pain Care"

ABSTRACT: Chronic pain disproportionately affects US Military Veterans compared to the general US population. An important marker of high-quality care for chronic pain is the use of patient reported outcome measures that can provide standardized data showing pre-, intra-, or post-treatment outcomes for clinical decision making. A substantial challenge in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is the inconsistent collection of patient reported outcome measure data and its embedding within unstructured notes in the legacy electronic health record when documented. This presentation will highlight two efforts related to patient reported outcome measures data in VHA pain care. The first describes a retrospective analysis of clinic documentation from VHA chiropractic clinics using natural language processing to quantify patient reported outcome measure use as a quality metric. The second describes the implementation of a pain measure set in pain clinics and interdisciplinary pain management teams across the VHA enterprise, highlighting an implementation strategy package with analysis of pain-related outcomes.

YSPH values inclusion and access for all participants. If you have questions about accessibility or would like to request an accommodation, please contact Charmila Fernandes at Charmila.fernandes@yale.edu. We will try to provide accommodations requested by September 25, 2025.