Patient-Reported Outcome (PRO): Any report on the status of a patient's health coming directly from the patient without any interpretation or interference.
The Patient-Reported Outcome is the platform for the patient to be heard. Why must we listen? Our health system is moving toward focus on quality of care from quantity of care. Quality is measured as a combination of lives saved, readmission, medical outcomes, as well as quality of life measures such as pain and mobility. However, the very words of the patient that define quality in the patient’s interest are too often ignored. We must center our care and attention on the patient’s needs, values, and experiences. A curious thing about pain is how easily we forget it after the fact. When, where, how much... these are all important details the doctor wants to know, and we find ourselves struggling to recall, filling in the gaps with maybe- truths. It certainly would be helpful to record pain when it happens, where it happens. At the doctor’s office, that record should already be in the doctor’s hand to be used that much more easily to diagnose and treat the patient. Your Patient Reported Outcome is a direct connection between you, the source of critical medical data, and the decisions regarding your care and the future of the health system.
- Improved communication The patient can initiate communication of relevant medical data with the doctor to send outcomes, align priorities, and arrange the care they need.
- Less time on data entry and better time with the patient The patient records her own experiences and pushes it to the health record. Her doctor can then spend more face-to-face time discussing her care, rather than conducting time-consuming interviews and performing data entry.
- Improved quality of treatment PRO tools allow the patient to report clinically relevant information at the point of pain, when it is most reliable, to inform the most appropriate treatments. Over the course of treatment, the PRO promotes accurate recordings of outcomes to advance changes when needed.
- Personalized care The patient is able choose treatments, personalized to their needs, by drawing on the past successes, experiences, and self-reported outcomes of many similar patients who came before them7,8,10
- Improved healthcare for all The patient provides invaluable data on treatment outcomes. The data is accurate, timely, and multi-dimensional. These qualities of data are possible only with many patients’ voices.
This repository contains a start on several projects seeking to overcome these challenges and push PROs to realize their potential. Most are still in the conception stage. The benefits of being open source are three-fold. First, the extended community provides verification, support, and feedback, improving the quality and relevance of the process and product. Second, the mature product will provide services as well as an open source repository of resources, designs, and code for other developers and teams to utilize. Third, the open process has a positive impact on medicine by building community and interest in improving the state of PROs.
- Voice PROM: Smart speaker application that provides a Voice enabled method to submit responses to a PROM platform.
- Symptom Identifier: “Patient-owned” application that captures a subjective nebulous idea of symptoms and creates a structured collection of data that can be conveniently and consistently shared with clinicians in person, via email/text, and via the Medical Record.
- ROS reporter: Application that captures a Review of Systems for a patient, leading up to an clinician encounter. Can be requested by Clinician either in office, or at home before appointment, or in waiting room.
- openPRO Platform: Platform for clinicians and patients to administer and communicate PROMs, ad hoc.
- PROM repo: Provide an indexed, annotated, repository of PRO measures.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fAE18PLHUfr7rt9vRky85bf4wOxZhp0pmk_qFT8C1gE/edit?usp=sharing