Recent Australian publications echo the continuing advocay for PROMS.
Dr Zachary Tan of the startup CancerAId states about the app Pulse and IT 23/8/18
“For clinicians the power of the app is its patient-reported outcomes(PRO or PROMs) capability,which Dr Tan described as THE MISSING LINK between the patient and their clinicians.”
ICHOM calls PROMs Outcomes that matter to patients.I say PROMs are the catalysts that will not only not only dramatically improve healthcare but medicine itself.
Around the world, every health care system is struggling with rising costs and uneven quality, despite the hard work of well-intentioned, well-trained clinicians. Health care leaders and policy makers have tried countless incremental fixes—attacking fraud, reducing errors, enforcing practice guidelines, making patients better “consumers,” implementing electronic medical records—but none have had much impact.
It’s time for a fundamentally new strategy. At its core is maximizing value for patients: that is, achieving the best outcomes at the lowest cost.
In this Harvard Business Review article by Michael E. Porter and Thomas H. Lee, they write about a strategy for moving to a high-value health care delivery system comprising six interdependent components:
The transformation to Value Based Health Care (VBHC) is well under way. Some organisations, such as the Cleveland Clinic and Germany’s Schön Klinik, have undertaken large-scale changes involving multiple components of the value agenda.
The result has been striking improvements in outcomes and efficiency, and growth in market share.
Read more at Harvard Business Review…
It’s often said, “What gets measured gets managed,” a quote often attributed to management consultant Peter Drucker.
Collecting patient feedback can be vital to guiding general practice services and meeting patient needs.
Collecting and responding to patient feedback is considered such a key aspect of general practice operations that it is enshrined into the RACGP’s Standards for general practices (4th edition) (the Standards). Patient feedback can help guide the
improvement of quality in service delivery, which can then result in better clinical
outcomes for patients.
Learn how Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) and Patient Reported Experience Measures (PREMs) enable doctors to have a more concrete measure
of the effectiveness of their general practice services.
RACGP Good Practice Issue 3 March 2017 (see page 18)
RACGP – Royal Australian College of General Practitioners
In a recent book, “Using Patient Reported Outcomes to Improve Health Care”, the authors, Appleby, Devlin and Parkin, demonstrate how in multiple ways Patient Reported Outcome Mesasures (PROMs) can improve healthcare.
It is a practical, introductory guide to the best use of Patient Reported Outcomes (PROs) to improve the quality of health care and patient health.
Buy the eBook from Amazon.
One of the most effective tools to help overcome long term issues, PROMs helps:
In this way medicine will incorporate the great advances of physics in the last 100 years, to be really medicine based on modern science.
Five spine surgeons discuss patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) in spine and how they have influenced their practice.
“[PROMs] are really imperative to evaluate how well your different operations or procedures are performing.”
TODD LANMAN, MD. BEVERLY HILLS, CA, USA
Many established therapies for metastatic prostate cancer (mPrCa) have known side effects that can affect a patient’s quality of life.
PROMS can assist in providing high-quality care and improve patient’s experience.
Four trials with actual PROM data showed that by using their respective PROMs, there was at least maintenance of or improvement in QOL outcomes.
Full details at Cancer Therapy Advisor. Read more…
The eHealthier platform provides an easy way to incorporate PROMS into real-life practice.
The inaugural Value-Based Health Care Conference will be held in Perth and online in May 2021 to raise awareness of value-based healthcare (VBHC) and the work being done in this area across any/all disease types or conditions. VBHC focusses on delivering the outcomes that matter most to patients at the optimal cost. This approach is already transforming whole health services e.g. NHS Wales, the Dutch health system and has been adopted by some of the largest health care providers worldwide e.g. MD Anderson.
The aim of the conference will be to showcase and celebrate Australian value-based healthcare innovation, initiatives, implementation, research, and training from all areas of the health care system, with discussion on topics as diverse as cancer, stroke, dental health, and more.
Location: Perth, Western Australia
Venue: Parmelia Hilton Perth
Date: 27 May 2021 9:00am to 28 May 2021 04:00pm
In early civilisations, there was no distinction between “rational science” and magic, and so far as to sometimes involve the calling of deities. However, empirical observations of illness and the reaction to treatment eventually were systematically recorded, later following scientific methods.
In the West, it was in the early 17th Century that medicine began to separate physical and spiritual in what is now considered “Newtonian medicine”. In short, much like Newton’s Laws of Motion where reaction arose from action, the reasoning was applied to the body in that normal and abnormal functions could be explained by mechanistic changes in the body. This is a mechanistic model taking the human body as a machine.
As scientific methods and tools improved over the centuries, so too did medicine. Systematic analysis of symptoms, reactions to treatments, and understanding of the body rapidly increased. We were able to study the “machine” in much greater detail.
In the 19th century, old ideas of infectious disease epidemiology were gradually replaced by advances in bacteriology and virology. By the late 19th and early 20th century, statistical methods such as correlations and hypothesis tests were introduced making much more sophisticated analysis possible. Now, we were able to study the great variety in “machines” across populations.
Public health became more prominent and important in the 20th century especially during the 1918 flu pandemic. Managing the healthy running of society’s many “machines”.
With all the specialisation in science and medicine, it wasn’t until the mid-late 20th century that medicine began to revisit holistic care in systems theory and the concept of health as a dissipative system.
Systems theory is the multidisciplinary study of systems to investigate phenomena from a holistic approach. Dissipative systems are what’s known as open systems, that is, a system having the capability to operate outside of equilibrium or a stable steady-state, and constantly exchanging matter, energy and information from the external environment with automatic self regulation among other features. In other words, a hyper-complex “machine” interacting, and evolving with its environment.
Patient Reported Outcomes Measures (PROMS) have been shown (ref) to be effective means to bridge the traditional Newtonian medicine practiced widely today, with the systems theory and dissipative systems concepts with the aim of delivering holistic wellbeing for patients. This includes social, lifestyle and
environmental elements.
PROMS are also a key part of providing Value Based Health Care (VBHC) to populations such as groups of patients of a medical practice, employees, customers, through to state, national and worldwide populations.
eHealthier is a digital platform for managing PROMS built by medical practitioners for the healthcare sector. An effective diagnostic tool now available to physicians and public health managers to help identify, measure and track wellbeing, eHealthier simplifies patient data capture, data management and analysis, all in a secure easy to use cloud platform.
Contact eHealthier today for a discussion about improving wellbeing and a demonstration of the eHealthier platform.
January 2017 produced two publications that are likely to add significantly to interest and uptake of ePROMs in 2017.
The Australian government’s current consultative process has the potential to catapult Australia’s health system to be the world’s best practice.
The key decision is whether the health minister is bold enough to include in the new Quality improvement incentive patient reported outcome measurement.
These new tools are the catalyst that will change all of the health care as predicted by Professor Michael Porter of Harvard Business School.
Patient reported outcome measures if included will be the first occasion that we will be measuring health rather than healthcare.
Ideally the four types of patient reported outcome measures will be included that is functional measures, cared for measures (PREMS), preventive measures and longevity measures
Should this occur and the government utilises an app such as the eHealthier ePROM app the annual savings set out in my earlier blog of of $2 billion will eventuate within three years
