App Promises to Improve Pain Management for Dementia Patients

University of Alberta (U of A) scientists are developing an app to help healthcare providers assess and manage pain in people with dementia and other neurodegenerative conditions, reports Medical Xpress . The app was assessed in a study published in JMIR mHealth and uHealth . The tool provides a digital pen-and-paper observational checklist to help medical staff evaluate pain in those they care for. "Our work is to develop an application for nurses to use, as well as a back-end repository that stores and manages this data safely," said U of A's Eleni Stroulia. The trial compared the digital app on a tablet with conventional pen-and-paper evaluation, and nurses favored the app over the traditional method when dealing with patients, and also noted that it helped them feel less stressed and burned out. Stroulia said the app will enable healthcare workers to more quickly see whether pain management strategies are working with individuals. "When we have this kind of data, we can build models to understand the impact of different interventions," she explained. "This is what can change policy and care in the long term — evidence-based policy that changes the state of how we practice medicine."