The Pain Project

The Pain Project

  • Project Title: The Pain Project
  • VERG Researchers: Stevie Carnell and Heng Yao
  • Description: Use virtual human interviews as an intervention to reduce healthcare providers’ implicit race and socio-economic biases when making decisions about pain care.
    • Problem: Implicit race and socio-economic biases when making decisions about pain care.
    • Goals: The goal of this project is to understand and reduce disparities in pain treatment because of doctors’ implicit biases. Previous studies have shown significant differences in the pain treatment given to Black and low socio-economic (SES) patients in comparison with White and high SES patients. This project has developed virtual human interventions as a way to understand and combat these biases. One intervention consists of videos created with the Sims that reflect different scenes of a patient’s life, focusing specifically on how back pain has affected that patient’s life. Other work to understand pain treatment biases has used videos from Unity to show different kinds of patients demonstrating pain.
    • Technology: Virtual People Factory (C#, JavaScript), Unity, The Sims 3
  • Links to videos: https://youtu.be/_JlDXVJS_jo
  • Publications connected to the project:
    • Journal Publications
      • Hirsh AT, Miller MM, Hollingshead NA, Anastas T, Carnell ST, Lok BC, Chu C, Zhang Y, Robinson ME, Kroenke K, Ashburn-Nardo L. (2019).  A randomized controlled trial testing a virtual perspective-taking intervention to reduce race and SES disparities in pain care. PAIN. Editor’s Choice
    • Abstracts, Posters, and Presentations
      • Anastas, T., Miller, M., Hollingshead, N., Carnell, S., Lok, B., & Hirsh, A. (2018, September). Providers’ implicit and explicit attitudes about race and socioeconomic status influence their pain treatment recommendations. 17th World Congress on Pain, Boston, MA.
      • Clark, E., Anastas, T., Miller, M., Hollingshead, N., Carnell, S., Lok, B., & Hirsh, A. (2018, September). Compassion for patients mediates racial and socioeconomic differences in providers’ pain treatment decisions. 17th World Congress on Pain, Boston, MA.