Neck and low back pain (NLBP) are leading causes for years lived with disability in Europe and worldwide. About 70% of all adults experience NLBP at some point in their lives, and both conditions are among the top ten in terms of overall disease burden expressed as disability adjusted life years. Management of NLBP is a difficult challenge for healthcare professionals since their decisions have a decisive impact on the patient’s future health and welfare, as well as on the economic burden on the public and private healthcare systems. However, health professionals often lack appropriate information to tailor the management and follow-up of individual patients and to predict the outcome of a certain treatment.
The overall aim of the Back-UP project is to develop a tool with patient-specific prognostic models, to support more effective and efficient management of NLBP, based on the digital representation of multidimensional clinical information, including: personal, health, psychological, behavioural, and socioeconomic factors related to NLBP; biological patient characteristics, including musculoskeletal structures and function, and molecular data; and workplace and lifestyle risk factors. Back-UP will provide prognostics of pain, disability, function and time off work in the following weeks and months after clinic consultations, and support to rehabilitation, return to work and self-management, including tailored personalised plans.
Back-UP is targeted to a wide range of clinicians that deal with patients with NLBP like general practitioners, physiotherapists, chiropractors, occupational clinicians, etc., occupational managers, and patients. Different platforms, optimised for those user profiles, will be developed and integrated, based on state-of-the-art digital health technologies.
