The electronic Persistent Pain Outcomes Collaboration (ePPOC) is an initiative that utilises standardised information and patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) to benchmark and measure outcomes in the area of pain management. It was established in response to one of the high priority recommendations of the National Pain Strategy: to improve standards in pain management through national benchmarking of care and treatment provided by specialist pain management services (PMSs).

PMSs participating in ePPOC routinely collect information about their patients and outcomes, and submit this to ePPOC for reporting and analysis.

The items included in the ePPOC adult data collection serve the dual purpose of:

defining a common clinical language to aid communication between pain management providers
facilitating the routine collection of nationally consistent pain management data for the purpose of reporting and benchmarking to drive quality improvement.

The ePPOC dataset consists of five levels of linked information:

Patient
Episode
Pathway
Service event, and
Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs)

Patient reported outcome measures

Adult data item codebook

Adult data items

Data scoping conventions - adult

Data file format - adult

Supplementary values

Evolution of the adult data collection