Table 5:

Clinician Stakeholder Quotes Illustrating Reasons for Ranking a Pain Index as Most Important

Pain index % clinicians ranking it most important	Clinician Quotes
Worst Pain 34.5%	“I guess maybe that’s … really when I need to make a treatment change. You know, if we have whatever treatment we’re testing and they still have fairly high worst pain, our treatment’s not very good or we need to sequence treatments differently or we need to add on, you know, combine treatments. So, it tells me as a clinician, … we need to do something different.” “I can tell from those answers if there might be anything that … provokes it and makes it worse so I can use it as a jumping-off point so I can ask them, ‘At that time?’, ‘What were you doing?’ or ‘What position were you in when it was at its worst?’”
Least Pain 15.1%	“Least pain can open up questions as to what gets them there. It is useful for that. It can tell us how effective whatever medications we are using, when they’re most effective, if it gets them down to that or if an intervention that we’ve performed gets them down to the least amount of pain. Especially if we’re doing some sort of diagnostic process, if they get down to 0 out of 10 or 1 out of 10 and they are usually at a 9 out of 10, you know, that does tell us that whatever we’re doing has at least some effectiveness for whatever period of time they’re in that least amount of pain. I think the least amount of pain we need that for medical necessity purposes and things like that, so it is a useful measure.”
Average Pain 14.0%	“It’s like if you can only ask one thing, how can that not be what you ask. If you literally only had one question, which you don’t. I guess I was kind of thinking about it in terms of importance if I can ask one question. That’s what I’d want to know…. I mean I think it reflects that’s what their own subjective report is of their experience. Again, if you only have one data point, it’s not a rich data point, but it tells you something for that individual.”
Time in High Pain 13.8%	“So in terms of judging or evaluating whether treatments are effective, I definitely wanna know when would be their worst and when they’re more severe or unable to function or do anything. And so those questions are probably more important to me, and so the amount of time they were in high pain.”