Medical appointments tend to be too short to address all our concerns and care does not always feel patient-centered. In an effort to remedy these common experiences and give patients a voice, the Rocky Mountain MS Center at Anschutz Medical Campus recently launched a new initiative: Patient Reported Outcomes (PROs).
The MS Center at Anschutz Medical Campus clinic invites all patients with appointments to complete questionnaires (available on iPads in the clinic and sent out by email) about their quality of life. This self-assessment program will change the face of patient care by helping providers recognize quality-of-life changes over time, making patients’ concerns central to their ongoing care, and recognizing similarities or differences within the patient population as a whole.
The first step of the PRO program is to collect baseline data. Patients coming into the clinic will be asked to fill out questionnaires that cover quality-of-life factors such as depression, anxiety, cognition and mobility. Their answers will make up the baseline data—which will be used as a comparison for later responses—and will provide a picture of quality-of-life trends in the patient population overall.
The baseline data will also help identify our patient population’s most prominent issues. From that information, the MS Center team is developing web-based educational tools, which patients will automatically receive based on their responses. If patients report fatigue, for example, educational resources with techniques for alleviating fatigue—such as videos and articles—will be sent to them. Tailored education is one of many unique aspects of the PRO program that will revolutionize health care and give patients the opportunity to drive their own care.
Once the first step of collecting baseline data is complete, individual responses will be available to each patient’s physician and care team. When patients arrive for their appointment, providers will already have a sense of how they are feeling and if their quality-of-life is being impacted in one or several ways. The self-assessment responses will alleviate the pressure on patients to remember their questions during their appointments, and make their experiences central to each appointment. It will also allow medical providers to recognize quality-of-life changes over time because patients will be asked to complete self-assessments each year.
Rocky Mountain MS Center Medical Director, Dr. Tim Vollmer, described the importance of the PRO project and spoke on behalf of all the MS Center physicians and clinic staff about its importance.
Tell us about the PRO program and why it is so important.
PROs are part of the future of medicine and a field that has been progressing for the last few years, but not very rapidly. Medicine, unlike most other businesses, has tended to focus on physicians’ opinions. We’ve learned that what physicians and patients think is best is not always the same. PROs will make us more aware of exactly what patients are experiencing and what’s important to them, which will help us provide the best possible treatment strategies and outcomes. PROs are a way to rapidly assess a board field of symptoms and identify the most problematic.
The PRO program will not only make us better at what we do, but also, from the patient’s perspective, help us understand how different problems are impacting their function and quality of life. By completing these PROs, patients are creating a record that they can use. It will provide perspective by tracking how symptoms change over time. It is essential that patients actively participate and recognize the importance of the PRO program because it gives them new responsibility in their health care.
A good comparison is the automotive industry, which pays a lot of attention to customers’ needs. Car quality today is light-years ahead of 1970, when I was growing up. Similarly, medicine needs to focus on continuous quality improvement as it relates directly to patients, their experience in health care and their outcomes.
The PRO program is a process, and we really want patients’ feedback. Our goal is to change the system to better serve patients. We want to know what they like and don’t like about the PROs. We also want to get them more involved in how we practice medicine overall. Their input on what we can change to improve their care and comfort is essential. They are the reason we do what we do.
The Rocky Mountain MS Center at University of Colorado is very grateful for the support of the COPIC Medical Foundation for the PRO Program.
Additional links
- Read eMS News article – A Glimmer of Hope in Treating Progressive MS.
- Interested in more articles? Subscribe to Rocky Mountain MS Center’s InforMS magazine.
The RMMSC’s Patient Reported Outcomes project is supported
by a grant from the COPIC Medical Foundation.
