HRONIC NONCANCER PAIN IS associated with considerable physical and psychosocial impairment, distress, comorbid depression, and increased health care use and costs. [1][2][3][4] Many primary care patients report chronic pain, 2,5,6 most commonly musculoskeletal pain. 2,7 Guidelines for chronic pain treatment have been developed. 8,9 However, implementation has been problematic, especially in busy primary care practices in which access to recommended treatment components may be limited.Multifaceted, collaborative interventions can promote guideline-concordant care and improve outcomes for chronic conditions in primary care. 10,11 These interventions, based on the chronic care model, 10 attempt to optimize patient and clinician interactions via education and activation while providing system support, including care management and clinician feedback. Several investigators have demonstrated improvements in pain intensity and pain-related function in studies of interventions using collaborative approaches. 12-14 However, one of these studies used a pre-post design, 14 and the

As measured by medical record review, additional training and clinician feedback did not increase provision of documented guideline-concordant pain care, and adherence to guidelines by primary care clinicians did not improve clinical outcomes for patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain.

A collaborative care intervention was well accepted by primary care providers and modestly improved receipt of guideline-concordant care but not symptoms or self-perceived health in patients with stable angina.

Background: Clinical interventions based on collaborative models require effective communication between primary care providers (PCPs) and collaborative support teams. Despite growing interest in collaborative care, we have identified no published studies describing how PCPs prefer to communicate and interact with collaborative support teams. This manuscript examines the communication and interaction preferences of PCPs participating in an ongoing randomized clinical trial of a collaborative intervention for chronic pain and depression.