Neurology & Pain Management Coding Alert

Federal agencies pool their resources for your benefit. 

Pain management physicians who are interested in being part of clinical studies – or who simply want to stay atop current developments – have a new tool at their disposal. The Interagency Pain Research Portfolio (IPRP) launched in late May 2014 and allows users to search for information about federally-funded pain research projects. 

Database users can search more than 1,200 research projects in a multi-tiered system. Tier 1 grants are classified as basic, translational (research that can be applied to diseases), or clinical research projects. Tier 2 sorts grants by 29 scientific topic areas related to pain (such as chronic overlapping conditions) and according to research themes (such as pain mechanisms, risk factors and causes, or treatments and interventions). 

Why it’s important: Pain is a symptom of many disorders; chronic pain (338.4, Chronic pain syndrome, or 338.2x, Chronic pain) can present as a disease in of itself. The economic cost of pain is estimated to be hundreds of billions of dollars annually in lost wages and productivity.

 “The database reveals a diverse research portfolio in which contributions from federal agencies and departments reflect their unique missions and the populations that they serve,” said Linda Porter, Ph.D., Policy Advisor for Pain at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

“For the first time, this information has been collected into a single database that can be mined to ensure that federal research efforts are not redundant and to identify opportunities to collaborate and share resources across agencies,” Dr. Porter added. “In addition, it will help the federal entities that support pain research to identify gaps in research areas and trends in topic areas over time.”

The database is managed by the Office of Pain Policy at NINDS (National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke). To access the IPRP database, please visit: http://paindatabase.nih.gov.