Understanding Patient-Reported Outcomes

Understanding patients’ views and experiences is essential to learning whether healthcare services and policies are meeting the needs of patients and what steps should be taken to improve the system. Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) seek to capture patients’ views about their own health and the health services that they receive.

Patient-reported outcomes are often collected in the form of standardized questionnaires, or patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs). Unlike clinical and physiological outcomes, PROMs can directly understand how health conditions or interventions affect patients’ quality of life.