In recent years increased attention to pain in children and adolescents has led to a recent 2-fold increase in opioid prescriptions. Unsurprisingly, the annual rates of analgesic-related adverse drug events (AR-ADEs) have soared to include >21,000 hospital admissions and hundreds of accidental overdose deaths in children and adolescents, and has remained a significant problem. At the heart of the problem is the fact that parents are left to manage opioid usage with little or no training. Many parents discontinue analgesics for children with significant clinical pain while others overlook signs of toxicity, leaving children vulnerable to ongoing pain or life-threatening events. under this SBIR project, ArchieMD will team with the University of Michigan to develop an interactive smartphone app that provides education and tools to help with accurate real-time assessments of both pain and analgesic-related adverse drug events (AR-ADEs). The goal is to improve analgesic safety and efficacy by enhancing the analgesic and pain management skills of parents whose young children are prescribed these agents for home use. We propose an adaptive approach that provides an interactive means to push and motivate ongoing assessment, and to provide immediate feedback to augment recognition of important symptoms in the absence of on-site professional guidance. Static and more traditional formats (e.g., brochures or websites) can present similar facts, but require self-initiation to seek and retrieve information. The efficacy of such differing analgesic message formats has not been compared. However, we hypothesize that an interactive, tailored smartphone app will facilitate and motivate pain and symptom assessment and improve parents' skill in recognizing serious signals and making appropriate analgesic decisions.

This project will impact public health by developing a smartphone app that will help improve analgesic safety and efficacy by enhancing the analgesic and pain management skills of parents whose young children are prescribed these agents for home use.