Postoperative Telehealth Mindfulness Intervention to Improve Pain-related Outcomes and Reduce Opioid Use After Lumbar Spine Surgery

We will conduct a two-arm, nonrandomized, mixed-methods trial to refine a telehealth mindfulness-based intervention (MBI) for patients recovering from spine surgery. The procedures will be as follows:

1. Recruit, consent and enroll up to 26 patients over a period of 8 months who are planning to have their first lumbar spine surgery for a degenerative spine condition at the Vanderbilt Comprehensive Spine Center. Recruitment will occur at a routine preoperative clinic visit or over the phone, with the spine surgeon's permission to approach the patient.
2. Two weeks after enrolled patients complete surgery, they will meet with an interventionist for eight, weekly one-on-one or group-delivered telehealth MBI sessions over a Zoom online telehealth platform. Sessions will be 75 minutes long (90 minutes for the first session). Sessions will be audio recorded and the interventionists will be supervised weekly.
3. Participants will complete self-report assessments prior to surgery, two weeks after surgery (pre-intervention) and three months after surgery (post-intervention).
4. After completing the intervention, participants will complete an intervention satisfaction survey and an audio-recorded 30-minute semi-structured interview over the phone to provide feedback regarding their experience with the intervention components and relevance to their postoperative recovery.
5. We will code and analyze interview data continuously (every 2-4 interviews) until we reach data saturation and then integrate results from interviews and self-report surveys to determine relevant intervention adaptations, constructing a refined intervention protocol for pilot testing in a randomized controlled trial. We anticipate needing approximately 13-20 participants to complete interviews to reach data saturation (i.e. no new, relevant information obtained from interviews).