CARNATION, an NIH Collaboratory Trial, will test an implementation support intervention designed to enable community health centers to use electronic health records for coordinating primary care–based pain care that is congruent with integrative pain management. The study, currently in the planning phase, will generate urgently needed evidence for how to make integrative pain management available in community health centers, where limited resources present barriers to the delivery and coordination of such care.
At the NIH Collaboratory’s 2026 Annual Steering Committee Meeting, we spoke with co–principal investigators Lynn DeBar and Nicole Cook to learn more about CARNATION. Rachel Gold, a research investigator at OCHIN, is also a co–principal investigator for the study.
“One of the biggest challenges is always, how do we design an intervention recognizing that primary care providers have so little time and such a large burden,” said Cook, a research investigator at OCHIN.
“We’re really thinking about setting up a system that allows us to provide providers with the tools they need on the ground with patients, make the appropriate referral to what we’re testing with [integrative pain management], and also allow us to measure outcomes in a way that makes sense,” she said.
“Something that’s really exciting about the potential impact of this is that we are doing this in a very, very large network that has a business model of helping these clinics with quality management,” added DeBar, distinguished investigator at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever been involved in another enterprise where that route is so clear,” DeBar said.
In the coming weeks, we will share more highlights from the 2026 Annual Steering Committee Meeting. Access the complete meeting materials.
