Patient-centred care seems like such a hot topic right now. I don’t know, maybe my radar is just extra sensitive to this stuff, but over the last couple of years it seems to have grown into an avalanche of interest. Everywhere I turn there’s a new theme journal, a new initiative or policy, new money, all aimed and moving patient-centred care forward.
A lot of this interest seems targeted at collecting, measuring, and reporting outcomes from the patient’s perspective. This envelops everything from patient education and engagement, to involving the patient in the clinical decision making process, to having them report their health status. There is an enormous effort right now to quantify health care from the patient’s point of view.
With this quantification comes a myriad of measures: patient-reported outcomes (PROMs), patient-reported experience measures (PREMs), patient-centred outcomes, decision quality, decision support, decision regret… the list could go on and it is often hard to keep track. This can also lead to confusion and miscommunication. One thing that’s become clear is the growing need for reliable, high quality information. By this I mean information beyond the conceptual, the theoretical, and the buzzwords so often spun into presentations from researchers, providers and health care authorities (I think we’ve all seen enough of the powerpoint slide of concentric circles with the patient in the middle).
No, I mean real, honest information about how these patient-based measures play out in practice. How do you collect this stuff? How do you analyze it? How does it translate into usable information for clinical practice or health care policy? This is the kind of information you can really only get from the firsthand experiences of those that are on the frontline putting this into practice.
That’s the kind of experience we hope to deliver with this blog. Like our sister site, healthcarefunding.ca, we will strive to provide this information in a balanced and impartial way. Moreover, we plan to bring you this information from a number of different perspectives. In addition to our regular posts, we’ll also feature guest bloggers that approach measuring the patient perspective from a clinical, policy, analytic, or quality angle, just to name a few. This, we hope, will give you a broad sense of how measuring the patient’s perspective is operationalized and applied.
In bringing this to you, we hope to build a community of folks interested in measuring the patient’s perspective. We welcome your involvement and encourage you to contribute to this blog in whatever capacity you feel comfortable. Want to comment on a post? Have at it. Got an idea for a post of your own? Send us an idea. Want to guest blog? Get in touch. Welcome to the Patient Reported Outcomes blog.