AACIPM Provides NCCIH with List of Determinants for Whole Person Health

Over the last few months, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) has been accepting public comments as it seeks to define a set of key Determinants for Whole Person Health. NCCIH is aiming to identify a set of just twenty factors that influence health, either positively or negatively, and that encompass the full continuum of the human experience (biological, behavioral, social, and environmental).

Comprehensive, team-based, multimodal, integrative pain management (CIPM) is widely accepted as the standard of care for people living with pain and is in line with the concepts of Whole Person Health. However, additional research is needed to help CIPM to be understood by the public and health care professionals, covered by public and private insurers, and accessible to people with pain. With this in mind, our submission to NCCIH was thoughtfully developed by a team of stakeholders with extensive professional expertise in insurance, research, large-scale employer purchasing of healthcare, state and federal health policy, patient advocacy, medical ethics, and clinical practice.

NCCIH limited its request to no more than 20 determinants to ensure a list sufficiently comprehensive to capture the key elements of Whole Person Health, yet succinct enough to be manageable in terms of any eventual development/deployment of a CDE-based measurement tool. This list could ultimately be used to identify a set of common data elements to be used in either research or patient care.

After numerous discussions with stakeholders, the AACIPM Response to the NCCIH Request for Information: Identification of a Set of Determinants for Whole Person Health was submitted on June 17, 2022. For each determinant, a full list of related MeSH terms was also included to aid NCCIH in developing its list of common data elements.

AACIPM submitted the following list of Determinants for Whole Person Health:

13. Occupation / Work Status
14. Quality of Life
15. Education
16. Security
17. Diagnosis & Co-morbidities
18. Treatments & Medications
19. Time Between Illness, Diagnosis, Initial Treatment, and Return to Function
20. Pain Prevention across the Pain Spectrum (acute, chronic, high impact)