{"doi":"10.1093/pm/pnac020","title":"Engaging Veterans and Military Service Members to Optimize Pragmatic Clinical Trials of Nonpharmacological Approaches for Pain Management","abstract":"In 2010, Congress created the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), which marked a shift in the focus in how healthcare research was conducted, concentrated, and funded. Health services researchers were challenged to institutionally integrate the interests, needs, and perspectives of the communities they served into the research lifecycle while delivering a value-add to those same communities [1, 2]. The Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) Veterans Health Administration’s (VHA) Health Services Research and Development Service (HSR&D) had similarly been implementing various strategies to promote patient engagement for several years. As early as 2011, the lead author for this narrative (A.A.; a Veteran of the Global War on Terrorism), was invited to serve as a member of the Executive Steering Committees for the HSR&D Center of Innovation (COIN) and Polytrauma/Blast-related Injury Quality Enhancement Research Initiative Program at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System, and subsequently at the pain management focused COIN at the VA Connecticut Healthcare System. In this capacity, the author represented the Veteran perspective in strategic planning and ongoing monitoring and evaluation of these Centers’ research portfolios. By the early 2010s, HRS&D encouraged COINs to develop robust Veteran engagement groups in the context of broader strategic efforts to promote participatory research to enhance the meaningfulness and impact of research from the perspective of Veterans. In 2016, VA partnered with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Defense (DOD) and established the NIH-DOD-VA Pain Management Collaboratory (PMC) to address the critical gap between strong evidence of the effectiveness of nonpharmacological approaches for the management of pain and common co-occurring conditions, and the limited use of these approaches in routine clinical care in Military and Veteran health systems. The PMC supports eleven pragmatic clinical trials of these approaches conducted in these settings [3]. By then, the PMC was prepared to develop a more formal mechanism to link research to the communities they serve, with a specific focus on a cross-functional consultancy group that was intended to assist all four facets of health research—the research side, the patient side, the clinical side, and the community/stakeholder side [4]. In this context, the Patient Resource Group (PRG) was established as a unique PMC advisory council that supports various aspects of engagement during the research lifecycle. The PRG serves as an advocate for the Veterans and Service Members and their dependents participating in healthcare research. The PRG provides consultation to the PMC Principal Investigators (PIs), organizational stakeholders, and external community stakeholders (Military, Veteran, and healthcare communities, including Veteran Service Organizations). As the chair of the PRG, A.A. accepted primary responsibility for recruiting and engaging a diverse group of members. The 13 members are drawn from diverse professional (Officer and Enlisted), racial/ethnic, gender, war-time era, age (range 30’s to 70’s), and socioeconomic status perspectives. All have either lived experience of chronic pain and/or are directly involved in the pain community such as VHA staff or patient caregivers. Several members have experience in health research and the field being studied, and several are members of Veterans Service Organizations (VSOs). The objective was to assemble a group that mirrors America and accounts for the whole community. The PRG is designed to support the successful completion and impact of the PMC trials by enhancing recruitment materials and strategy, promoting external engagement, and optimizing plans for dissemination and implementation of positive study findings and products. As such, the PRG acts as the “community-connected” consultancy that helps better understand the needs of the communities being studied and p","journal":"Pain Medicine","year":2022,"id":294322,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":2,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9445,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":362633,"name":"Lily Katsovich","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":431791,"name":"Robert D. Kerns","orcid":"0000-0002-3834-973X","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":979715,"name":"Adam Anicich","orcid":"0000-0002-0273-7087","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":6,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:31:01.450041Z","pmid":"35143672","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}