Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
•
Self-report measures.
Using this method, the clinician records pain meas-
urements such as the worst pain or the least pain, as perceived by the patient
reporting it.
•
Observational measures.
This kind of measures includes the clinician ob-
serving the patient regarding aspects such as behavior or activity perform-
ance, as related to pain.
•
Physical-functional performance tests.
Finally, this kind of tests is a method
of measuring the performance of a patient in functional tests, in order to
prove back pain effects in functional activities.
Although all of the aforementioned methods
are considered to be valuable and nec-
essary in order to identify and measure a patient's medical information, in reality au-
thorities recognize
self-report
measures to be the gold standard of the intended pur-
pose, because of its consistency with the definition of pain, and which is why it is
widely used. Therefore, the most prominent way used to collect back pain related in-
formation is usually self-reports, which are typically in the form of
questionnaire
[29].
Moreover, according to [27], this questionnaire normally consists of question items
specifically designed to collect information regarding the pain's description, loca-
tion(s), activation, severity, frequency, symptoms, as well as previous medical prob-
lems and/or treatments, all based on the patient's responses. Specifically, the former
aspects mentioned (pain description, location(s), activation, severity, frequency, and
symptoms) are indicators of a patient's
current clinical information
, whereas the latter
(previous medical problems and/or treatments) are part of the
patient's history
.
Patient Medical History.
Usually, as the name implies, a patient's medical history in-
cludes information regarding previous medical problems and/or their treatment, as well as
some information concerning the patient's current situation. To this end, several question
forms exist and are used in the literature as a way of collecting such patient medical his-
tory information. As an example, to simply illustrate the method, [33] in their study about
evaluating patients with chronic back disability, they have used the questionnaire shown in
figure 2 to collect the patient's medical history information.
Therefore, in overall, knowledge of a patient's medical history could prove of a
great value in the diagnosis process, since it could certainly provide the clinician with
such information (e.g. previous admission to hospital, surgery, treatment, etc.) that
would be used as indicators to where the subsequent test and measurements should be
performed. Moreover, [17] further support the usefulness of a patient's history, by
citing in their review study examples which illustrate that besides the classical clinical
symptoms that need to be identified, history may also add valuable information to a
comprehensive picture of the patient's pain situation and diagnosis.
Patient Clinical Information.
The next step after establishing an initial understand-
ing of the patient's medical history is to proceed with the collection of an individual's
clinical information regarding his or her current condition. According to [27], such
information concerns the basic understanding of the pain description, location(s),
activation, severity, frequency, and symptoms. Thus, several tools that address pain
intensity (
how much a person hurts including severity and frequency
), pain affect
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