Patient Reported Outcomes (PRO)– A New Approach to Improve Quality of Life

Delivering patient-centered care requires a healthcare environment that fosters collaboration between patients and their healthcare teams. One way of promoting patient-centered care is by integrating patient-reported outcomes into the clinical setting. Collecting these results with regular care ensures that you get important information that only patients can provide. This provides insight into the patient's experience with symptoms, quality of life, function, values, preferences and health care goals. Patient-reported outcomes are now playing a role in successful shared decision-making, which can improve safe and effective care delivery.

With PRO in procedure-oriented practice, a positive patient experience is influenced by interactions with staff and physicians, communicating relevant and interpretable information to the patient, and of course outcome of the procedure. PROs are important because they let healthcare providers know if the treatment is working and if the patient is recovering normally. Clinicians should be able to intervene with new therapeutic strategies if the PRO shows any abnormalities. PRO can address patient pain levels, fatigue, depression, sleep quality, and social functioning.

PRO provides unique information about the condition and its treatment implications from the patient's perspective. Therefore, PROs can be enrolled in clinical trials to fully assess the impact of research intervention. PRO data can also be used to encourage positive patient word-of-mouth referrals

Predictors of unmet need (e.g., being an adult aged 50+ years, not having a long-standing illness, living alone) suggest many older adults with unmet needs may 'fall under the radar' of health and social care services. Generic patient-reported outcome measures or specific 'needs-focused' measures (e.g., falls measures) could be used to identify unmet care needs. When used in conjunction with GPs and primary care, electronic patient-reported outcome measures are embedded in digital health and care records, used for remote monitoring, alerting healthcare workers to potential problems, and assessing health

Patient-reported outcomes measurement could also help address unmet need in nursing home settings where people are more likely to be frail, older, and have multiple long-term conditions. Patient-reported outcome measures could help with personalized care planning by ensuring that decisions about care are centered on the person's top health and well-being concerns. Through the use of patient-reported outcome measures, proactive identification of unmet needs or early detection of deteriorating symptoms could ensure appropriate support, potentially preventing the need for additional care, including hospitalization, at a later date.

Get in touch with us right now to see how we can collaborate towards a healthy future through reliable, useful patient-reported outcomes.