Time to Get Ready for PROM

We’ve all taken them – patient experience surveys asking about wait times, phone systems, friendly receptionists, and more. But the wave of the future is the PROM – and we aren’t talking about the fanciest high-school dance of the year.

PROM stands for patient-reported outcome measures and, while they haven’t taken a strong foothold in the fee-for-service world, they will certainly become essential in the value-based care of the future. PROMs seek to determine whether patients are actually getting better as a result of the care they’ve received by a provider. Countries such as England, where all of their care is value-based, are already using PROMs to gather long-term outcome data on their patients and services.

In the U.S. healthcare system, there are so many circumstances in which patient outcomes aren’t apparent to providers. Take a hip replacement for example. In all likelihood, the patient was referred to the surgeon from another provider. While the surgeon may have a post-op visit or two with the patient, in most cases, they don’t know how the patient’s health and wellbeing were affected long-term by the procedure. A year later, is the recipient of the new hip any healthier? Are they more active? Has their quality of life improved? Are they in less pain than before the procedure? How could the surgeon know?

PROMs seek to address this very issue. Whether you are a patient or a medical provider, you’ll start seeing PROM-like questions on new patient surveys, especially as value-based care becomes the new normal in the healthcare world. And it’s certainly time for a new dance.