e-PainSupport: A Digital Pain Management Application for Home Hospice Care.
Masako Mayahara, JoEllen Wilbur, Louis Fogg and 2 others
PMID 37897444WHAT IT FOUND
The e-PainSupport app was adapted for home hospice caregivers with pain education and nurse-visible pain summaries, but automatic EHR medication updates worked in only one hospice agency; no patient pain outcomes were tested.
Key findings
01The enhanced app has four components: pain reports, a nurse pain summary, and a caregiver education module.
02Caregiver feedback changed report labels to 'I am in Pain Now' and 'End of Day Report' and added a way to resubmit an end-of-day report submitted too early.
03Automatic EHR medication updates worked in one hospice agency; the other agencies required manual data input.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
The paper reports app development, usability changes, and EHR integration, not patient outcomes. Only three caregiver advisory board members used the prototype for one week. No objective audit checked whether medication use recorded in the app matched actual administration. EHR integration worked in one hospice agency; the other agencies required manual data input. The study did not test whether the app improved pain intensity or app usage.
Declared interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that e-PainSupport improves home hospice pain control. The paper describes app development, caregiver usability feedback, and partial EHR integration; it did not test patient pain outcomes.