Additional Intervention for Selfmanagement in Chronic Pain Patients

Chronic pain is a major, complex and expensive problem and has a major impact on the quality of life of patients, daily functioning, mood and absenteeism. Various interventions have been developed that are particularly aimed at influencing and changing behavior in which self-management plays an important role. However, the perpetuation of long-term results appears to be a major problem and even leads to a relapse into “old” behavior, which means that patients often seek valuable health care again. Two additional interventions have been developed in an earlier project (SOLACE) to prevent this relapse: "Do It Your Self" and "Value-oriented Goals", but the effectiveness of these interventions in the long term has not been investigated. A first feasibility study seems promising with positive effects on the usability of these interventions in the rehabilitation centers involved. From this field, but also from the patients, there was an emphatic demand to test these interventions for effectiveness.

This led to the research question;
“Is an additional intervention (do it yourself and / or value-oriented goals) aimed at continuing to apply acquired skills after a successfully completed pain program effective in perpetuating the results in the long term and can this lead to a decrease of health care demand. "

This research is conducted in two work packages; (1) the development of a useful app with the content of the ealier developed interventions and (2) an effectiveness study in five rehabilitation institutes

There is an 30 % difference in relapse between chronic musculoskeletal pain patients who successfully run an extensive chronic pain program who had used the Agrippa application on the smartphone to avoid relapse compared to the patients who received the usual care relapse program.

3,6 and 12 months post rehabilitation program

Agrippa application on a smartphone compared to usual care