“Uncovering Factors Patients Use to Evaluate Meaningful Response to Migraine Treatment”

The objective of this project was to establish factors which are most important to patients when appraising the efficacy of migraine treatment using a data driven, rather than doctor driven approach. Migraine is a debilitating condition that impacts a multifaceted set of factors for a person, including physical, productivity, social, and cognitive factors. One concern is that current popular assessment tools for migraine do not adequately view the patient as a whole for their treatment, and traditionally only focus on only physical, pain-related items. Therefore, this project had two goals: first, to establish factors which are most important to patients when appraising the efficacy of headache treatment, and second, to develop a patient-reported outcome measure to evaluate meaningful response to headache treatment regimens, as defined by patients. Several stages of data collection and analysis have suggested that there is a gap between the factors patients with migraine find important when appraising the efficacy of headache treatment and current assessment tools. Further research into developing patient-centric assessments would help to improve patient communication with their provider and give a quantitative way to assess treatment response all while focusing on important factors patient’s use to gauge their response to treatment. These results will be discussed within their future applications to developing analytics tools for both the provider and patient.