PROMs: Why Putting Patients First Is Key to Success

PROMs can be described as standard tools or questionnaires which patients themselves complete to assess their health condition at the beginning and the end of a specific care cycle. These tools are separate from communication and comfort questionnaires called PREMs or patient reported experience measures, which focus on the experiences during the patients’ stay at a medical facility. By focusing on the outcome of a treatment, PROMs add an important layer to the analysis of the efficacy of specific instruments of care and are an invaluable tool for hospitals and other medical professionals.

The increased attention for value-based health care and PROMs has also led to a realignment of where and when these questionnaires are used. In the beginning, usage was mostly limited to clinical trials and assessing health technology. Now, they are also employed in standard care cycles which encompass the breadth of medical treatments available at hospitals. One example is the PROM program implemented by the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. Data collection began in April 2009 and currently covers all hip and knee replacements at NHS-funded facilities.

Although PROMs can be seen as a net positive for the task of establishing patient-centered health care as the new normal, uptake has been slow and problems related to a lack of standardized PROM procedures persist. This can be ascribed to factors like poor patient engagement and incentivization as well as hurdles in collecting raw data, running it through internal and external audits and disseminating the results to clinicians to improve care processes and instruments. In addition, larger governmental bodies and entities like national health ministries are often unresponsive when it comes to support and cooperation.

One way to incentivize the uptake of PROMs is by incorporating PROMs implementation as a metric within hospital rankings as a form of benchmarking for hospitals regarding their quality and outcomes of care as well as how patient centric their processes are. To this end, Statista and Newsweek developed a PROMs implementation survey in which top ranked hospitals all over the world can provide the status quo of their efforts of implementing PROMs and value-based healthcare within their institutions, the results of which were first considered for the ranking in the World’s best Specialized Hospitals 2023 and are now part of all Statista hospital rankings, such as the latest 2024 World’s Best Hospital ranking. Hospitals interested in participating in the Statista PROMs implementation survey can pre-register for the next survey cycle here.