The term “patient-reported outcome” (PRO) refers to any recorded statement of a patient’s health condition provided directly by the patient without any interpretation of the patient’s status or response to treatment by a doctor or anyone else. The advantage of PROs is that they effectively demonstrate the mental and physical effects of illness and treatment that impact patients’ health-related quality of life (HRQOL).
PROs are increasingly used in medical studies both to demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of interventions from the patient’s point of view and to support health policy and regulatory decisions. Healthcare professionals use PROs to monitor patients’ condition, identify unmet concerns and needs, prioritize and/or personalize treatment, and deliver value-based health services. Questionnaires referred to as patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) serve for routine reporting of PROs.
The doctor-patient relationship has naturally attracted the interest of policymakers and researchers in many fields worldwide. Experts expect the health outcomes and well-being of patients to improve greatly thanks to the increased involvement of patients in the decision-making regarding their health and care. One approach to achieving these results is to alter the ways in which physicians and patients interact with one another, particularly through patient-centered communication, including the use of PROMS to deliver data to medical professionals.
The Value of Patient-reported Outcomes
The consensus among researchers is that the reporting of outcomes improves care in the following ways:
- PROMs encourage patients to discuss their concerns with medical professionals.
There is compelling evidence that completing a PROM encourages patients to reflect on their lives, helps them to identify what they consider essential, and clarifies for them the impact of their illness.
- PROMs make clinicians more cognizant of patients’ issues.
PROM results notify practitioners of the issues of concern to patients, in turn triggering conversation and further care processes. Thus, research suggests that physicians may be more responsive when feedback communicated in PROMs informs them about the intensity of symptoms, at least when these data supplement rather than replace clinical interactions.
Conclusion
We have discovered that, for individualized and standardized outcome measures, the process of submitting PROMs causes patients to reflect on their health and, by doing so, increases their understanding of their illnesses. This conclusion is in line with previous findings showing that PROMs encourage patients to communicate with healthcare professionals. Additionally, we have found that PROMS provide patients with a way to share their problems with doctors by giving them “permission” to speak their minds and showing that doctors are interested in their opinions. Thus, completing a PROM is not simply a matter of retrieving information from a database or gathering structured, uniform data from patients. Rather, this tool is a way of identifying cultural and social factors that can alter how patients perceive questions, provide answers, and understand, frame, or perceive their condition.
