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Identifying populations with chronic pain in primary care: developing an algorithm and logic rules applied to coded primary care diagnostic and medication data.
Authors
Hafezparast N, Bragan Turner E, Dunbar-Rees R, Vusirikala A, Vodden A, de La Morinière V, Yeo K, Dodhia H, Durbaba S, Shetty S, Ashworth MAbstract
Estimates of chronic pain prevalence using coded primary care data are likely to be substantially lower than estimates derived from community surveys. Most primary care studies have estimated chronic pain prevalence using data searches confined to analgesic medication prescriptions. Increasingly, following recent NICE guideline recommendations, patients and doctors opt for non-drug treatment of chronic pain thus excluding these patients from prevalence estimates based on medication codes. We aimed to develop and test an algorithm combining medication codes with selected diagnostic codes to estimate chronic pain prevalence using coded primary care data.