Impact of an Enhanced Patient Reported Outcome Measurement (PROM) Strategy on PROM Completion Rates

Overview

in clinical practice has been curbed by issues related to the variability in use of these tools for decision-making, and universally poor completion rates over time. Patients may not see the relevance of responding to questions about their health, and the results may not be reviewed by the clinician or presented and visualized with the patient. The questions may seem impersonal (e.g. too general and not directly assessing their individual goals, motivations, aspirations), irrelevant (e.g., asking about symptoms of depression when a person is seeking musculoskeletal specialty care) and insensitive (e.g., asking about sensitive subjects at the outset thereby disengaging the individual), and redundant or awkward (e.g., presenting questions that seem very similar or administered in strange orders). Finally, PROMs may also confer some burden (e.g., long PROM questionnaires often used for research may be unnecessarily burdensome for patient care), and provide logistical challenges (e.g., difficulties in administering the tools at the right time points), adding to a poor patient experience.

The investigator sought to assess the impact of an enhanced and more personalized PROM strategy to overcome these barriers by providing i) a primer ahead of PROMs administration, ii) simple 3-part survey capturing capability, comfort, and calm, iii) a short distress and misconception survey, iv) goal setting question, v) summary sheet of PRO scores, and vi) a commitment intervention. Patients will subsequently be requested to complete the CollaboRATE survey, JSPPE survey, and questions about their experience in relation to the new format of surveys (only if they were in the intervention group) before receiving a text message reminder around 6-weeks followed by a set of deprioritization questions and the 3-part capability, comfort, and calm survey.