Clinical Decision Support for Chronic Pain Management and Shared Decision-Making IG - Local Development build (v0.1.0). See the Directory of published versions

Analytics

Introduction

In order to measure the effectiveness and usage of the MyPain and PainManager Dashboard we need to add an analytical component to each of the applications. We face the complications of some sites not wanting to opt into data collection and the possibility of compromising PHI. Additonally we want to be able to add this functionality while minimizing the impact to the development timeline.

Pain Manager Dashboard Built-in Analytics

The basic PainManager Dashboard application contains some basic analytic capabilities. If an endpoint and an x_api_key exist, which can be altered at the site level, PMD sends to that endpoint a report including whether or not the patient met the CDS inclusion criteria, lists each section and subsection of the summary (along with the number of entries in each subsection), and provides an overall count of entries. No collection of specific patient information.
For this functionality to be implemented, an endpoint for RTI and/or an endpoint for each site would need to be set up as a server and to handle and process the incoming data for storage and retrieval.

Google Analytics

An alternative to the built-in analytics is to use Google Analytics. It also can be turned on or off at the site level. It can collect such information (but not limited to these) as

• conversion rate - how many finished the questionnaire and/or submitted it
• unique visitors
• demographics - if it is desired to collect these without ip addresses or other PHI
• percentage that each section was selected
• time on site (how long to complete questionnaire)
• how many clicked on links (i.e. ACPA car with 4 flat tires video)
• site speed - loading and processing

Google offers a free account and an enterprise level account. The free account should be adequate to collect the information needed. The free account also allows custom metrics to be defined and harvested to be displayed in the Google Analytics Dashboard.

Each site that will implement local analytics will need to acquire their own Google Analytics account and include the tracking code in the application’s config.json file. The presence of that code will determine collection of the data. Flags can also be set to determine which events and data will be collected.

PHI Risks

The built-in PMD analytics do not collect individual patient identifiers. Google Analytics will have IP-address anonymization always enabled to insure confidentiality as described at IP Anonymization.

Additional Questions

In a second layer of the application’s evaluation, additional questions could be added to the questionnaire to get additional user input for the assessment.

Time for Implementation

Time to implement the first layer of functionality would be two weeks. Implementing the second layer adds two weeks additional development time.

Recommendation

We recommend implementing Google Analytics for MyPain and Pain Management Dashboard. It is well-established technology and Google handles data collection minimizing development time. It provides a wide variety of analysis data options with separate pieces being able to be turned on or off through configuration. Google Analytics also has the advantage of not requiring us to establish a data storage repository with a retrieval system.