June 29, 2011: IOM Report Emphasizes Benefits of ACTION
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) released its much anticipated report on Relieving Pain in America: A Blueprint for Transforming Prevention, Care, Education, and Research. One of the key recommendations made by the report is to "Improve the process for developing new agents for pain control." The accomplishments of IMMPACT and ACTION were reviewed and presented as examples of very successful initiatives involving multiple stakeholders, and the report concluded that the intent of these initiatives "is to enable improvements in trial design that may ... speed the development of improved pain treatments. Ongoing support for these efforts will have an important impact on improving the availability of evidence-based therapeutic options for pain care." The IOM report also emphasized that "Although the goals and objectives of IMMPACT and ACTION relate directly to promoting the development of analgesics, their indirect effect has been to promote knowledge and consensus on a broad array of methodological, measurement, and trial design issues relevant to research more broadly." Dr. Dennis Turk, Associate Director of ACTION, served as a member of the IOM Committee, and Dr. Robert Dworkin, Director of ACTION, was invited to provide a background presentation describing the evolution and objectives of the ACTION public-private partnership. The complete IOM report can be found here.