Back Pain Study

  • Research type

    Research Study

  • Full title

    Initiation of an innovative study combining digital patient generated data with health records to improve the understanding of back pain - proof of concept study

  • IRAS ID

    244369

  • Contact name

    Matt Cooper

  • Contact email

    matt.cooper@nihr.ac.uk

  • Sponsor organisation

    University of Leeds

  • Duration of Study in the UK

    1 years, 0 months, 31 days

  • Research summary

    Prevalence in back pain is an increasingly large burden to the NHS, patients and employers. To drive improvements and understanding of patient burden, research is required to gain better awareness of the patients’ experience of the disease.

    Traditional approaches to collecting information at predefined intervals limits the quality and completeness of information related to back pain often related to recall bias and hence, novel study and data collection designs are required.

    This study uses a novel approach which aims to gather more frequent data from patients using electronic health (e-health) technology. The study will use e-health technology to capture patient-reported data and combine this with electronic medical records (EMR) to provide a complete patient record. The patient-reported data will be captured using an application on a smart phone. This data is then combined with specific extracts of EMR data within the existing capability of the GPs research environment. The data linkage is performed using a unique anonymised patient identification (ID). The data will be held in a secure environment at all times. This novel design will limit burden for investigators and has the potential to provide better insight into the patient experience over time.

  • REC name

    East of England - Essex Research Ethics Committee

  • REC reference

    19/EE/0037

  • Date of REC Opinion

    1 Feb 2019

  • REC opinion

    Further Information Favourable Opinion