Blog Posts

Enhancing clinical decisions with patient-reported outcomes

The desire to bring the patient’s voice to the forefront of clinical encounters is ever-present. However, obtaining that information accurately isn’t as easy as asking how the patient feels or whether they are getting better.

One helpful approach is using a set of patient-reported outcome (PRO) instruments designed to measure a patient’s quality of life in different health domains. PROs quantify a patient’s quality of life and can be used to track progress over time, evaluate different treatment options and be included in shared decision making discussions.

Patient-reported outcomes

The Patient Insights team within Optum developed a tool that reports patient outcomes over several therapeutic areas.

They include:

SF-12v2^® Health Survey

• The SF-12v2 is a practical, reliable and valid measure of physical and mental health
• The tool uses 12 questions to measure functional health and well-being from the patient’s point of view. This quality-of-life measure can be used across age, disease and treatment group, and is appropriate for a wide variety of applications.
• The SF-12v2 provides scores for each of the eight health domains and outputs component summary scores

Asthma Control Test

• This is a five-item survey used to measure asthma control in individuals 12 years of age and older
• The test assesses frequency of shortness of breath, symptoms, use of rescue medication, effect on daily functioning and overall self-assessment
• It helps identify and detect asthma patients who are not well-controlled

TouchWorks® EHR Integration

These patient-reported assessments are available to the provider to assign to the patient. The patient can then be prompted via email to complete the survey. Patient scores are then available to the clinician within the EHR to use during office visits to help guide treatment options, monitor progress over time, or to be used in data analysis. Real-time scoring interpretation against normative data is also available for both individual patients and aggregated populations. This enables seamless integration of the patient voice into the clinical workflow.

With the integration of Optum’s Smart Measurement System® into Allscripts TouchWorks® EHR, the administration of patient-reported outcomes is now more easily completed.

To learn more, visit the Allscripts Application Store.