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A team from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) and pain and emergency professionals from the Hospital General de Valencia have developed Painkey App. This new app helps assess, through artificial intelligence techniques, the pain level in people who come to hospital emergency departments and thus contributes to streamlining and facilitating their diagnosis.

Currently, three out of every four patients who go to the hospital emergency room are in pain, and, in addition, they tend to have higher return rates. Between 40% and 50% of these patients frequent this service several times a year.

"Painkey can make distinctions between reasons for alarm or severity, based on pain types, and differentiate acute pain episodes from chronic pain episodes. In addition, it can distinguish patients with exacerbated chronic pain and those who usually go to the emergency department. It thus contributes to improving both patient care and the functioning of the emergency room," says Dolores López Alarcón, anesthesiologist and clinical head of the pain unit at the General Hospital and promoter of the Painkey project.

Using an initial questionnaire, Painkey provides a comprehensive assessment of the pain of patients who come to the emergency room for this reason. These data are incorporated into the patient's clinical history, and the system proposes a circuit according to the urgency, the patient's fragility or risk of suffering an adverse event, and the complexity of each case.

This way, the application helps to have a pain assessment before triage. This results in an increase in quality and safety because it will provide essential information that, on the one hand, will send an alert to triage so that the nurse can prioritise the patient and, on the other hand, will help the physician during care assistance.

"Painkey can be customised to organise the emergency by care circuits so that it is adapted to the needs of each patient. In addition, it will allow us to have an innovative pain assessment because we will have a total assessment that can help us avoid chronicity or detect patients at risk of suffering chronic pain," explains Dolores López.

Gema Ibáñez Sánchez, an engineer in the group of technologies for health and well-being (SABIEN) of the UPV Institute of Information and Communication Technologies (ITACA), explains that this application is capable of suggesting a particular care circuit thanks to the data analysis that combines process mining with a mobile application.

"We are now in the first phase in which the application will be piloted in the hospital for two months, allowing us to ensure that everything is working correctly. After that, we will begin a second phase to implement the circuits gradually," adds Ángeles Celda, an emergency department nurse.

Thus, the tool will be implemented to assess the pain of all patients in the hospital's Emergency Department. However, the aim is to extend it to health centres that refer patients with pain to this service and even those who have an emergency outside the health centres and are attended by the medicalised mobile services.

Painkey was the winner of the Grünenthal Challenge of the VI Health Hackathon. Jesús Mandingorra Giménez, Fernando Alfonso Ríos, Eva Mateo Rodríguez, and Ricardo Rubini from the Hospital General de Valencia, and Carlos Fernández Llatas, also from the ITACA-SABIEN group at the Universitat Politècnica de València, also participated in its development.