Drs. Curtin, Hernandez-Boussard Receive R01

Drs. Catherine Curtin and Tina Hernandez-Boussard have received an R01 grant for their project "Identifying Optimal Pain Management for Elders." This 5-year study with funding from the NIH's Agency for Healthcare Research and quality will let them build upon their previous work optimizing postoperative pain management.

"Dr. Hernandez-Boussard and I have been collaborators for a long time, and this was a natural extension of our work," said Curtin. "Elders have unique needs, and we want to look at how pain and the medications to treat pain impact important outcomes such as delirium and falls after surgery."

Curtin and Hernandez Boussard plan to develop scalable, open-source risk stratification tools for adverse pain outcomes in elders and validate their work at the VA. They believe their work could also curb the number of prescribed opioids.

Dr. Curtin is a professor in the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. Dr. Hernandez-Boussard is an associate professor in the Departments of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics), Biomedical Data Science, and Surgery. They have collaborated on multiple publications together including:

• The rise of non-traumatic extremity compartment syndrome in light of the opioid epidemic
• Acute pain after breast surgery and reconstruction: A two‐institution study of surgical factors influencing short‐term pain outcomes
• Preoperative Factors Associated with Remote Postoperative Pain Resolution and Opioid Cessation in a Mixed Surgical Cohort: Post Hoc Analysis of a Perioperative Gabapentin Trial

in the last year.