The app is great for assessing pain in the non verbal and it works perfectly well on the verbal. DA when demonstrating it said you can trick it, as he did when he used it on himself. That was to create some pain reflexes in his face to show up on the assessment for the demonstration. He said it works better on the unconscious or sleeping.
The thing about PainChek is that it also creates a timeline log and chart of pain over time. So you can see what assessments have been made and when, what medicine has been prescribed and taken and what effect on the pain level that has had. This is all stored digitally with all the benefits involved with that.
I can see that aspect of the app being incredibly useful across the board for any patient, verbal or not. I have no idea if this logging feature is unique to PainChek or not. Presumably there must be logging software for other pain scales or that incorporate the Abbey scale. Does anyone know?
I'm just thinking maybe PainChek can make some changes to how their app works to allow this logging section to be utilised with or without the assessment section. In using PainChek you must complete each section of the assessment, of which the video is one portion. If that video section is fallible for the mentally aware then the whole assessment can be compromised. But surely anyone can fake the symptoms of pain? You can say you're in severe pain, even if you're not. Or moan and groan, wince, limp, cry and howl. So there is the element of doubt in any pain assessment for the mentally aware, PainChek doesn't overcome that - nothing can.
But if you need to make assessments on the mentally aware, PainChek is as good as any. But as it currently assigns a significant part of the pain score to the video, presuming it to be accurate (as it's designed for the non verbal demented) then I guess it would need tweaking to be used for the mentally competent.
I'd be really interested to know how they rolled this out to every bed in that case study example.
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