Bio
Dr. Rashmi Bhandari joined the Pediatric Pain Management Clinic and Stanford faculty in 2005 and has since been working with children who have complex chronic pain conditions and their families. She is the Director of Psychology Services for the Pediatric Pain Clinic and overseas 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 has extensive training in bio behavioral interventions for chronic pain such as biofeedback and is certified by the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis.
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 adoption 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 patient tailored interventions in real time while creating opportunities to study important predictors and consequences of treatment factors.
Dr. Bhandari, has successfully lead the Pediatric Pain Clinic in multiple clinical innovations including tele-medicine, canine-assisted therapy, and sleep treatment interventions to continue offering evidence based treatments and improving access to care.
Dr. Bhandari has researched evidenced-based treatments for pediatric chronic pain and identification of important patient characteristics that may inform treatment outcomes. Integral to this research was the utilization of Peds-CHOIR, which was designed to track outcomes for children and adolescents with chronic pain and their caregivers. Her publications in peer reviewed journals documents the development and implementation of this registry platform as well as the potential for deep phenotyping of treatment responsive and non-responsive patients.
