Bio
Dr. Rashmi Bhandari joined the Pediatric Pain Management Clinic and Stanford faculty in 2005 and has since been working with children and their families who are struggling with chronic pain conditions, offering behavioral health treatments. She is the Director of Psychology Services for the Pediatric Pain Clinic and oversees all aspects of clinical pain psychology services. In addition to practicing behavioral pain medicine, Dr. Bhandari launched the pediatric pain psychology fellowship training. The education curriculum created for the pain psychology fellowship is one of the leading standard in the field, educating future pediatric psychologists who want to specialize in pain medicine.
Dr. Bhandari is a committed clinician, educator, and researcher with a focus on assessment and development of treatment interventions to improve the lives of youth with chronic pain. Decisions about the appropriate treatments, however, are dependent on accurate and useful data—data that have been lacking for adults and children who experience chronic pain. This lack of information inspired the creation of a heath registry called CHOIR. Dr. Bhandari helped lead the pediatric adaptation of CHOIR, called Peds-CHOIR (Pediatric Collaborative Health Outcomes Information Registry) which is a novel, open-source outcome-dual tracking vehicle for youth with chronic pain and their caregivers. This registry is utilized by clinicians to offer patients tailored interventions in real time while creating opportunities to study important predictors and consequences of treatment factors. Dr. Bhandari academic focus on predictors of treatment outcomes for children has led to multiple publications contributing to the science of pediatric pain medicine.
Dr. Bhandari, has successfully lead the Pediatric Pain Clinic in multiple clinical innovations including tele-medicine, canine-assisted therapy, and group interventions to continue offering evidence based treatments and improving access to care. Dr. Bhandari utilizes evidence based treatments in her work including cognitive behavioral therapy to treat pain, biofeedback, clinical hypnosis, and SPACE treatments for parents to foster children's functional recovery (supportive parenting for anxious childhood emotions).
