Patient reported outcome measures could help transform healthcare

Routine use of patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) has the potential to help transform healthcare, says Nick Black. Not only can PROMs help patients and clinicians make better decisions, but they can also enable comparisons of providers' performances to stimulate improvements in services Patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) can drive the changes in how healthcare is organised and delivered. Key to this will be to link doctors' use of PROMs in the treatment of their patients with collection and aggregation of the data for assessing and comparing the performance of providers-all to improve healthcare quality.