A small medical society couldn’t handle a big grant alone. A smart long-term partnership was able to help.

In 2023, the American Academy of Pain Medicine (AAPM) was invited by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to apply for a $2 million grant to develop guidance for clinicians to treat low-back pain. The invitation was too relevant an opportunity for AAPM to pass up. But there was just one problem: It didn’t have the bandwidth to do it. A small-staff association not long removed from being managed by an AMC, it would need help to follow through on the grant’s requirements.

Ultimately, AAPM developed partnerships that allowed it to do so, and the guidance was released earlier this month. AAPM CEO Sharon H. Kneebone, IOM, FASAE, CAE, shared some of the insights it gained from the process.

Know your strengths. The FDA grant had intense reporting requirements that AAPM knew it couldn’t handle on its own. “We would have needed to have the staff capacity to do all the reports and updates that need to happen,” Kneebone said. “Even the know-how to write and reply to a federal grant—we needed to learn how to set up, manage, and administer the grant.”

To that end, AAPM staff consulted with one of its board members, who recommended the Pacific Northwest Evidence-based Practice Center at Oregon Health & Science University, which specializes in healthcare reporting to state and federal agencies. The Center was able to focus on the reporting element of the grant, freeing AAPM to focus on developing a communications strategy around the guidelines. 

Keep the end user in mind. Healthcare guideline development typically involves clinicians, scientists, and subject-matter experts. To a surprising degree, though, actual patients can often be absent from the process. That’s something AAPM and the Center wanted to address in this case; the panel developing the guidelines included a patient advocate who’d gathered patient input during the process.

“We are starting to see more cases where a patent is part of the guidelines,” Kneebone says. “We were all of the opinion that this needed to be patient-centric. They need to provide feedback: ‘You need to make this more understandable’ or ‘Have you considered X?’”

Build on what you’ve learned. Developing the guideline was an accomplishment, but Kneebone notes that it’s just one step in a longer process. The next part involves what she calls a virtuous cycle of learning—communicating the guidelines to the relevant stakeholders. AAPM has developed clinician- and patient-focused websites around the guidelines, and a free webinar on the guideline that can be used for CE credits. It’ll also be surveying practitioners about their usage of the guidelines. “Three months [after they participate in the webinar], we’re sending a follow up survey to everybody who participated in the education to see if they changed their practice, and if they didn’t,” Kneebone says. “We’re trying to measure adoption rates, which is something that the FDA was very interested in.”

The experience gives AAPM more confidence about looking for similar grants in the future, and for how to establish the parameters of partnerships. “You need to be clear and precise about who’s going to do what,” she says.

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