How Tracking Patient-Reported Outcomes Impact Patients and Providers

Wed Nov 13, 2024 by Evercommerce

There is a lack of valid and useful outcome data in today’s healthcare. Why? The ability to effectively harness information has proven elusive, mainly because of the quality of the patient data captured. This shortage can affect everything from research and patient safety advancements to higher healthcare costs. Comprehensive patient-recorded outcomes (PROs) have the power to change this.

PROs are changing healthcare by directly capturing patient views on their health and treatments. These outcomes serve as a benchmark to help providers tailor care, promote patient communication, improve shared decision-making, and elevate service quality.

This article takes an in-depth look into:

How patient-reported outcomes impact our healthcare system.
How PROs help clinicians better serve their patients.
Real-world use cases and results of PRO tracking platforms from an industry leader.
How to choose the right PRO tracking solution for your practice.

How Patient Outcomes Impact Our Healthcare System

Generally speaking, patient outcomes are defined as the impact of a healthcare service or intervention and can include results in the following areas:

Patient health symptoms, trends, functionality, or quality of life
Patient care preferences and satisfaction
New research, prevention strategies, treatments, and care models

With this information, how do patient outcomes affect our healthcare system? In short, they place patients at the center of decision-making. Some top impacts include:

Patient insights: Outcomes help healthcare systems and providers align with their priorities, participate in decision-making, and ensure care accessibility.
Provider education: Outcomes can help providers educate patients on care, treatment, and services.
Improved reputation: Patient experiences are directly connected to the reputation and success of providers and healthcare systems.

Unfortunately, without harnessing this information, healthcare providers will continue to face challenges regarding patient outcomes. These often include:

Poor communication: When providers don’t explain treatments clearly or don’t check in with patients, it can lead to poor outcomes.
Patient adherence: Patients may not follow treatment protocols or take medicines as prescribed.
Delays in treatment: Lack of follow-through with recommended screenings and diagnostic procedures.

To combat these issues, patient-reported outcomes (PROs), or any data coming directly from the patient, can play a crucial role in assisting providers to better monitor and detect patient symptoms, communicate with patients, and facilitate shared decision-making.

doctor and patient

What are PROs (Patient-Reported Outcomes)?

Patient-reported outcomes can be a “crystal ball” of sorts, providing crucial insights into a patient’s overall condition and how it affects their quality of life. Tools used to measure PROs are essential to bringing important data to clinicians. For example, the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System, or PROMIS, is a tool that improves the accuracy and efficiency of health assessments. It tracks results such as pain, fatigue, and emotional distress that impact quality of life. Other types of PRO measures or PROMs may target a specific disease or treatment, such as the health-related quality of life (HRQL) measure.

PROMs aid in following a patient’s progress and enhancing decision-making. Still, not all patient-reported outcome tools are created equal. Next, we discuss AI-powered healthcare technology solutions making lasting impacts on data collection.

How OutcomeMD’s Technology is Different

PROs can enhance the quality of clinical services and care. However, some outcome measurements only focus on things like the patient’s general experience. They highlight opinions rather than outcomes. While these surveys have a place in patient management, they lack concrete data.

Solutions like OutcomeMD offer healthcare technology that sets a new standard for patient-centered care. This tool is a PRO tracking platform that helps healthcare providers collect and elevate their outcomes. OutcomeMD’s comprehensive analytic tools offer actionable insights and reports to clinicians, administrators, and payers, facilitating informed decision-making across all levels of care delivery.

But what separates them from other PRO tracking tools? OutcomeMD’s advanced healthcare technology:

Covers all specialties. Nearly all diseases, symptoms, and specialties are covered.
Uncovers influences. Their proprietary scoring method identifies and parses confounding factors.
Includes intuitive scoring. Easily interpretable scores for improved accessibility.
Clinician-centric. User-friendly experience for efficient care coordination.
Patient Marketing & Access: OutcomeMD enhances patient engagement by providing an intuitive way for patients to track and visualize their own health progress. Through targeted communication, providers can strengthen connections, increase patient retention, and ensure timely access to necessary care.
Quality Improvement: With real-time monitoring, OutcomeMD enables providers to track care quality, adjust interventions based on outcomes, and apply data-driven improvements to optimize patient care continuously.
Regulatory & Payers: OutcomeMD supports regulatory compliance through automated reporting and provides payers with clear outcome data that can inform reimbursement decisions and reinforce value-based care partnerships.

By utilizing this granular healthcare technology, both patients and clinicians gain a comprehensive understanding of how symptoms evolve over time. For example, as care progresses, patients can remotely track how their symptoms change and notifications alert clinicians of patients needing attention. These solutions can streamline clinicians’ SOAP charting, standardize how they assess patients, and provide structured data that can be used for high-level analysis of their overall patient population.

medical staff working with laptop

Who Benefits from Tracking PROs?

Providers, patients, insurers, researchers, hospitals, and healthcare payers all win when outcomes are measured. One study found that the benefits of tracking patient-reported outcomes include lower costs, saving time, higher data quality, streamlined symptom management, collaborative medical decision-making processes, and improved patient-clinician communication. These advantages can help healthcare groups such as:

Payers: Patient outcome tracking provides data showing the effectiveness of providers and treatments rendered. This information is critical for value-based care models and negotiating contracts.
Specialties: PRO measurement helps institutions provide precision medicine and care tailored to patients’ specific factors.
Providers: Precise tracking leads to better patient health outcomes and communication, loyal patients, referrals, good reviews, and more patients.

To highlight PRO tracking benefits, the DrChrono by EverHealth and OutcomeMD Webinar series spoke with Justin D. Saliman, MD, an orthopedic and sports injury surgeon, notable thought leader, and Founder & CEO of OutcomeMD. When asked about the advantages of using his tracking platform, Dr. Saliman states, “OutcomeMD uses a symptoms score. This allows me to spend less time interviewing patients because I know their symptoms and connect with them without asking 20 questions. When I see a patient at their follow-up, I don’t have to ask them how they’re doing because I can see how they’re doing. This leaves us time to talk about it. It improves the time you spend with the patient because you can connect with them rather than have it be a question-and-answer session.”

Tracking Outcomes Within Specialties

PRO tracking tools help some medical specialties tailor treatment to patients’ specific factors. The OutcomeMD platform provides this solution but goes a step further by covering all specialties. When asked what kind of assessments OutcomeMD offers, Dr. Saliman explains, “We offer a full selection of assessments, and we break it down by specialty. We have thousands and thousands of them in here, there’s literally a way to assess every condition in medicine. And we also have experts on our team who will help you know what assessments you need for care.”

He goes on to discuss OutcomeMDs’ solutions for behavioral health, “There are great measures for this [behavioral health], whether you’re using the system for things like depression, anxiety or sleep. If you’re in behavioral health, you’ve probably heard of patient outcome measures like PHQ 9, which is a famous one for depression. There’s also the GAD 7 for anxiety. These [assessments] are instantly deployable through your EHR by leveraging OutcomeMD. It’s a must-have for any behavioral health position or clinician.”

Dr. Saliman also reveals how their real-time tracking features impact patient results in behavioral health. He states, “When a patient who has depression takes their medication, they feel better. But sometimes, they stop taking their medication because they feel better. But then, they get worse. Now, [with OutcomeMD], since they can see their result on their phone instantly, they notice that they’re getting better. And they see that when they stop the medicine, they got worse.” He concludes that this real-time feature helps patients stay compliant with their medication and can significantly influence their overall mental wellness.

The DrChrono and OutcomeMD Integration

DrChrono, Inc., by EverHealth, the company enabling the medical practice of the future, and OutcomeMD formed a partnership to give practices using DrChrono’s EHR the ability to incorporate patient-reported outcomes into their clinical workflow. Through this collaboration, DrChrono’s EHR platform seamlessly integrates with OutcomeMD’s PRO tools, enabling clinicians to easily track, measure, and analyze patient outcomes over time. This integration allows for real-time insights into patient progress, improving decision-making and enhancing the overall quality of care.

The key features of this partnership include:

Seamless integration: Clinicians using DrChrono can access OutcomeMD’s PRO tools directly within their EHR system, streamlining the capturing and analyzing of patient-reported data.
Personalized care: The integration allows providers to tailor treatment plans based on individual patient outcomes, leading to more effective and personalized care.
Improved patient communication: Patients can easily report their symptoms, treatment responses, and overall well-being through OutcomeMD, providing healthcare teams valuable insights to optimize care.
Data-driven insights: The combined data from DrChrono’s EHR and OutcomeMD’s PRO tools will enable providers to track patient progress, identify trends, and make informed decisions to enhance patient outcomes.
Visualizations of Care: Providers and patients can see a timeline view of all their diagnoses, treatments, visits, medications, etc. all correlated with their progression through their PRO cycle.

How OutcomeMD is Helping to Shape the Future of Healthcare

Dr. Saliman was a fan of DrChrono’s EHR long before the creation and partnership with OutcomeMD. When using the platform, he noticed how flexible the system was and loved how the patient data seamlessly integrated into the provider’s clinical flow. This streamlined process played a role in Dr. Saliman’s creation of OutcomeMD. Today, the partnership between the two solutions results in technology where patient-reported outcomes and confounding factors, combined with DrChrono’s EHR data, empower clinicians with a real-world tool for predictive analytics across all medical conditions.

OutcomeMD’s continued mission is to make the patient the center of all healthcare decisions. By prioritizing patients’ needs, they will continue to strive to discover cures and advance medical knowledge, ushering in a new era of healthcare where every individual receives the highest standard of care and achieves optimal health and well-being.

Interested in finding a patient-reported outcome solution for your practice? Wonder where to start? Here are five actionable questions to consider before deciding on a PRO tracking platform.

What are the needs of your practice? Work with different team members to assess current data issues, limitations, and overall clinical needs.
Does it integrate with your EHR? See if the solution seamlessly integrates data from your EHR or other software/devices.
Does it work across all specialties? The platform should allow providers to assess any patient and track any treatment.
Have you tried different vendors? Shop various PRO tracking software vendors and request demos to see what solutions work best for your practice.
Can it help with billing and payers? See if the platform offers features that produce comprehensive reports tracking patient outcomes. This can help clinicians negotiate better contracts.

Interested in learning more?

Visit OutcomeMD to discover more about their vision and tracking real-world outcome data.

Visit DrChrono’s Partnership page to learn more about the integration and how you can improve the health of your patients and business today!