Making Virtual Reality Real: Advancing Clinical Uptake and Integration in Chronic Pain Management

Session Title: Making Virtual Reality Real: Advancing Clinical Uptake and Integration in Chronic Pain Management

Topic: CLINICAL SCIENCE

Description of Workshop: The use of virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) to support pain management has been rapidly growing over the preceding decade. Across adult and pediatric populations, there has been a growing interest in leveraging VR to manage both acute and chronic pain. In adult populations, VR for chronic pain has demonstrated effectiveness for supporting fear of pain and improving functioning. Among pediatric populations, VR research has largely focused on acute and procedural pain, also demonstrating good efficacy for reducing anxiety and pain. Relatively limited research has been conducted evaluating the use of VR among youth with chronic pain, yet initial research does signal the potential for VR to support fear of movement, promote improved functioning, and reduce pain. Despite the promise of VR, across adult, pediatric, acute, and chronic populations the preponderance of VR research is implemented by researchers and research teams, limiting the real world translatability of this potentially potent intervention. The purpose of the proposed workshop will bring together diverse research groups to present data on real-world clinical trials where implementation into clinical care was emphasized and more importantly VR delivery through clinicians rather than researchers. The included presentations will bridge clinical trial data and real-world implementation solutions.
The three presenters will discuss novel clinical trial data from three studies focused on implementing VR for pediatric chronic pain, representing diverse intervention delivery designs and diverse healthcare settings (United States, Canada, Germany). Dr. Courtney Hess is a pediatric pain psychologist and will present on a recently completed clinical trial implementing VR in three outpatient physiotherapy clinics for youth with chronic MSK pain. Dr. Jennifer Stinson is a nurse scientist and will present on another recently completed clinical trial focused on implementation of VR in hospital and home-based settings for youth with chronic MSK pain. The third presenter, Alexander Elser is a physiotherapist and PhD student who will present data from a recently completed implementation trial in Germany in which VR was integrated into outpatient physiotherapy practices for managing chronic pain in adults, leveraging physiotherapists as drivers of VR implementation. In addition, Floris van der Breggen who is based in the Netherlands will help bridge presented clinical trial data including researcher identified challenges in implementation and overview his company’s trialed solutions to these challenges. Floris will guide discussion and describe important implementation efforts including development of technology to streamline implementation, efforts to create technology platform unification, and leveraging research as training for hesitant clinicians. In this way, in addition to presenting clinical trial data that can support future research efforts to expand VR use for chronic pain, the proposed workshop will focus on implementation challenges and propose innovative approaches to improving clinical adoption and uptake of VR into the natural flow of clinical care. The workshop will emphasize the importance of education and training for clinicians, agile and adaptive research designs, and outline strategies for promoting clinical uptake of VR to sustain engagement beyond the research project and evaluation.

Speakers