Kevin McLaughlin
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Medicine & Clinical Research
Pain in the back, neck, joints and muscles is the single largest cause of disability in the United States, the top non-cancer reason people are prescribed opioids, and the biggest category of national health spending. Physical therapy reliably reduces this pain and disability and can cut spending by heading off imaging and surgery.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
musculoskeletal pain
MSK pain
physical therapy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Test whether a large health system can feasibly implement Remote Therapeutic Monitoring, an app for assigning and tracking home exercises, among a pilot group of physical therapists treating musculoskeletal pain.
- Collect feedback from participating therapists and their patients to refine how the mobile health program is delivered before scaling it up.
- Compare clinical outcomes between app-supported and standard physical therapy using PROMIS patient-reported measures gathered routinely across all musculoskeletal therapists at the institution.
- Measure effects on cost and on later care such as imaging and opioid prescriptions, and evaluate adoption and maintenance using the RE-AIM implementation framework.
More about the research
Its benefit, though, depends heavily on whether patients actually complete the home exercises they are given, and completion rates are often low. Patients labeled non-responders may then move on to injections, surgery or opioids they might not have needed.
Why it matters
If app-based monitoring keeps patients doing their home exercises and in contact with their therapist, people with musculoskeletal pain may get more relief from physical therapy and need fewer scans, surgeries and opioid prescriptions. Health systems and payers would gain evidence on whether newly reimbursable remote monitoring services are worth adopting at scale.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jennifer Waljee
Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, IN·Public Health & Epidemiology
Measure how state opioid prescribing limits affect opioid prescribing and adverse events after surgery, and how effects vary by policy feature, patient, procedure and prescriber, using commercial, Medicare and Medicaid claims with quasi-experimental methods.
Jennifer Steel
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Evaluate whether CARES, an electronic health record-based screening and stepped collaborative care intervention, improves patient-centered outcomes such as health-related quality of life, in a cluster randomized trial of more than 34 outpatient oncology clinics.
Nicole Henderson
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Identify patient engagement profiles for remote symptom monitoring in the national OncoPRO dataset using latent class analysis, and map their geographic and contextual distribution with geospatial methods.
The school
Johns Hopkins University: 100 labs on PI Pages, $4.1B a year on research, 622 research doctorates a year.
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