Ajay Wasan MD, MSc, MA

Dr. Ajay D. Wasan, MD, MSc, MA, is the Vice Chair for Pain Medicine in the Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine at UPMC and a Professor of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine and Psychiatry in the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He has particular expertise in interventional procedures, neuropathic pain medications, opioids, psychotropic medication, and the psychiatric co-morbidities of chronic pain.

He supervises clinical care across 15 pain clinics in the UPMC system, 20 clinical faculty members in the Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine, and all Division of Chronic Pain Management research. This research is funded by a variety of sources, such as the National Institutes of Health and industry.

Dr. Wasan’s current research interests are in the areas of tracking pain treatment outcomes using electronic records, mechanism-based treatment studies of negative affect in pain, quantitative sensory testing,  functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and preventing prescription opioid misuse in patients with chronic pain. His publications are in the general area of pain outcomes research and cover topics such as opioid treatment, interventional treatments, neuropathic pain assessment, the brain physiology of chronic pain, and the impact of psychiatric factors on pain response. Most recently, he has been working more in medical informatics and created a data repository of patient-reported outcomes coupled with electronic medical record data gathered from each patient at each visit seen across the Division of Pain Medicine. This is the Patient Outcomes Repository for Treatment (PORT), which uses the Collaborative Health Outcomes Information Registry software (CHOIR) to collect the patient-reported outcomes.