The Importance of Hand Appearance as a Patient-Reported Outcome in Hand Surgery

Hand appearance is meaningful to patients because hands are an essential part of human interactions, communication, and social integration. Recent literature indicates that hand aesthetics is an important, measurable patient-reported outcome. In hand surgery, several outcome instruments exist that accurately measure functional outcomes, but aesthetics is often overlooked or imprecisely measured. This makes comparison of disease burden and effectiveness of therapies, as they pertain to aesthetics, difficult. This special topic article outlines the aesthetic features of the hand, how literature is evaluating the appearance of the hand in outcomes research, and proposes a novel approach to assessing hand aesthetics.