H30 - Other(915) Assessing NIH funding patterns for pain: A systematic

approachD. Bradshaw, Y. Nakamura, C. Chapman; University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UTHealth policy experts not only must track the impact of conditions suchas chronic pain on public health, but they also require valid and accurateindicators of the resources provided for research efforts regarding suchconditions. Obtaining this information for such ubiquitous conditions aspain presents a significant challenge. Our research team has been en-gaged in a project to provide a publicly accessible interactive databasethat permits description and exploration of National Institutes of Health(NIH) funding patterns for research on pain, nausea and dyspnea. Thedatabase encompasses both basic science and clinical research projectscontained in the NIH’s own Computer Retrieval of Information on Sci-entific Projects (CRISP) database. While building our resource tool, wehave found the problem of characterizing a project’s relevance to painbased on the information contained in CRISP to be surprisingly difficult.A panel of pain experts who reviewed a subset of projects funded in2003 obtained in a search of the CRISP database for pain related termshad no better than 50% agreement on projects they judged relevant topain. We have developed an algorithm for categorizing projects using aset of syntactic and semantic rules based on occurrences and use of painrelated terms in the project descriptions. This set of rules differentiatesbetween primary- research for which pain or nociception plays a centralrole- and secondary- projects for which pain is tangential or is one ofseveral conditions to which the project may have relevance. It also dif-ferentiates clinical and basic science research. Applying these rules in areview of 2,476 NIH grants funded in 2003, we identified 1,148 grantsfor research on pain- 581 primary and 567 secondary- while achieving aninitial reviewer agreement rate of 93.8%. The presentation will discussseveral issues that remain and implications for the work.

(916) CRC survey of attitudes: eCRF vs paper CRFsN. Cantu, P. Desjardins, M. Hoelter Gonzalez, J. Hatcher, E. Conti; Clinical SiteOperations, Scirex Corp., Austin, TXTraditionally, clinical research coordinators transcribe information fromsource documents into the paper case report forms (CRFs). The purposeof this project was to compare the tangible and intangible costs relatedto transcription of paper CRFs vs data entry of electronic case reportforms (eCRF) and to compare the impact of the different systems on theworkload and attitudes of the clinic staff. Six staff from three clinicsparticipated in this survey. Clinics one and two assigned one full-timeemployee to perform the electronic data capture (eDC) and clinic threeassigned four full-time employees, on a part-time basis, to perform eDC.All staff were trained on the use of the eDC system. Meetings were heldweekly to integrate the changes and ensure the project’s success. Duringthe meetings, the staff were asked a series of questions to evaluate thesystem. The test period for the eDC system was 12 weeks. Comparativeinformation for the paper CRF systems was obtained from historicalknowledge from each of the clinics with the same type of studies. Al-though eDC did not fundamentally change the responsibilities of thesites, the coordinators were still accountable for the collection, entryand correction of the data. Staff were uniformly convinced that eDC didincrease the workload at the site, not reduce it. It was estimated that ittook three to four times longer and considerably more effort by clinicstaff to capture data on paper and then transcribe into eCRFs. Staffreported an increased understanding of clinic processes and an oppor-tunity for new learning. Criticisms of the eDC system included the repet-itive nature of the work, lack of mental challenge and system-specificproblems. This brief survey suggests that unless early planning and on-going communication is incorporated into the project, eDC systems riskcoordinator burnout and increasing turnover at sites.

S87Abstracts