Pain Management in Clinical Practice Research Using Electronic Health Records

Background: The use of electronic health record (EHR) systems encourages and facilitates the use of data for the development and surveillance of quality indicators, including pain management. Aim: to conduct an integrative review on pain management research using data extracted from EHR in order to synthesize and analyze the following elements: pain management (assessments, interventions, and outcomes) and study results with potential clinical implications, data source, clinical sample characteristics, and method description. Design: An integrative review of the literature was undertaken to identify exemplars of scientific research studies that explore pain management using data from EHR, using Cooper's framework. Results: Our search of 1,061 records from PubMed, Scopus, and Cinahl was narrowed down to 28 eligible articles to be analyzed. Conclusion: Results of this integrative review will make a critical contribution, assisting others in developing research proposals and sound research methods, as well as providing an overview of such studies over the past 10 years. Through this review it is therefore possible to guide new research on clinical pain management using EHR.