About

PainUSA is a Stanford-led digital health initiative designed to bring patients, clinicians, and researchers together around better chronic pain care. Under the leadership of Dr. Sean Mackey and Dr. Beth Darnall, the platform prioritizes scalable education, registry-informed insights, and sustained community engagement.

Mission & Vision

PainUSA's mission is to improve the lives of people with pain by building a national, patient-centered learning health system that generates real-world evidence, accelerates discovery, and drives better, more equitable pain care.

We envision a future in which pain care is guided by high-quality real-world data, informed by patients' lived experiences, and translated rapidly into effective, accessible, and accountable care for all.

Board

  • Sean Mackey, M.D., Ph.D.

    Redlich Professor and Chief, Division of Pain Medicine

    Physician and scientist dedicated to creating a future where pain treatment is precisely tailored to each patient, using advanced neurosciences, patient outcomes, biomarkers, informatics, and compassion.

    He is the Redlich Professor and Chief of the Division of Pain Medicine at Stanford School of Medicine, Director of the Systems Neuroscience and Pain Lab, and Program Director for Stanford’s NIH T32 postdoctoral research training program. Guided by the mission to predict, prevent, and alleviate pain, his research uses neuroimaging, psychophysics, genomics, and patient-reported outcomes to understand chronic pain and develop new therapies.

    Under his leadership, the Stanford Pain Management Center has twice been designated a Center of Excellence by the American Pain Society. He co-authored the Institute of Medicine report Relieving Pain in America and served as co-chair of the oversight committee for the HHS/NIH National Pain Strategy.

  • Beth Darnall, Ph.D.

    Professor, Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine

    Clinical pain psychologist, scientist, international speaker, and author focused on developing brief, scalable, and effective interventions for acute and chronic pain relief.

    She is Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, where she directs the Stanford Pain Relief Innovations Lab. She created Empowered Relief®, a single-session pain relief skills intervention now used across the continuum of care in more than 30 countries.

    As principal investigator, she leads multiple NIH- and PCORI-funded clinical trials involving thousands of patients nationwide. She has briefed the U.S. Congress on the opioid and pain crises, served on the NIH Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee, and is President-Elect of the United States Association for the Study of Pain.