The Promise and Power of Patient-Reported Outcomes
It’s easy to forget that while health care is two words, most of our focus in medicine is on the latter, care. But in addition to delivering treatment, health care organizations have a role in improving the lives and health of patients — reducing their symptoms, helping them take better care of themselves at home, and increasing their quality of life.
How do you start? Simple. Ask the patient.
That being said, most questions that physicians ask patients — of which there are many — aren’t quite enough to determine both each patient’s needs and define a good outcome. Most outcomes measures look at discrete numbers, like medication adherence, lab values, mortality, and readmissions, but don’t 1) capture why patients seek care or how they feel following treatment or 2) differentiate between different levels of quality in care.
What are PROMs
Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) turn validated surveys capturing how patients are feeling, healing, and recovering, into an easily-measurable numerical score. In other words, they capture each patient’s symptoms and well-being independent of outside interpretation. This allows care teams to truly measure and quantify the effect of different interventions based on the alleviation of symptoms, functional improvement, and patient satisfaction.
PROMs have become more popular following the Medicare Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) reimbursement and bundled payment pilots to measure outcomes and increase reimbursements for patient care. Growth in PROMs will continue as more health systems take on outcomes-based reimbursement and additional disease indications become eligible for alternative payment models.
PROMs identify and distill the very reason patients seek care by isolating their symptoms and tracking their progress throughout the care continuum. They also help health care organizations determine which treatments and interventions are truly improving outcomes for both individuals and populations. As opposed to most existing quality measures, PROMs can be applied across different indications, and in particular to indications that lack strong quality measures.
Why Use PROMs as a Health Care Organization?
1. Better, Faster Health Care
PROMs give care teams the power of personalization. Patients who show up to the clinic with a completed questionnaire specific to their disease indication, goals, and treatment preferences can steer a conversation immediately to the best solution for that patient, an important change as visits between patients and physicians continue to get shorter.
2. Cut Administrative Load
PROMs can automatically capture patient information before visits and be used to complete screenings for falls, depression, falls, risky behavior, and similar, reducing both the workload for front desk staff and documentation from clinicians.
Our Goal is to Make PROMs Easy
Despite their promise, technical and cost control challenges have made adoption of PROMs slow. That’s where we hope to help.
Analyzing and acting on PROMs can both improve quality of care and an organization’s resource allocation. Our system delivers custom PROM questions to patients via SMS, a convenient, no-install protocol for patients with an easy to use interface, and integrates with electronic health records in real-time to keep responses moving to the point of care as they arrive.
To date, Memora Health has helped health care organizations collect PROMs for Type II diabetes (blood sugar control, diet, and exercise), cardiovascular disease (weight, diet, exercise, pain, function), and surgery (recovery timeline, surgical site infection, pain, function) among others, and continue to build more automated PROM tools tailor-made to each organization’s needs every day.
Improved patient engagement, increased value, and better understanding of health care interventions makes PROMs indispensable, particularly as value-based care initiatives continue to gain steam in U.S. health care. Fundamentally, integrating PROMs as a routine part of health care is the key to giving patients the best quality of care in the most cost-efficient manner possible. That’s what our team at Memora Health is here to help health care organizations do.
Memora Health is building the operating system for care delivery that implements intelligent, streamlined workflows and revolutionizes the patient experience outside the care setting. We offer a smart end-to-end platform that unifies fragmented health care data to enable providers, payors, and life science companies to automate care delivery operations — from patient communication to documentation to reimbursement. We uniquely use artificial intelligence to digitize existing care delivery workflows, giving clinicians infrastructure that learns from every encounter they have. Memora supports a full suite of virtual care systems from automated patient intake and scheduling to remote monitoring and care pathways to billing and documentation. Memora is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Kevin Durant, Martin Ventures, and several healthcare strategic groups.
