Patient reported outcomes – experiences with implementation in a University Health Care setting

AIM: Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) have traditionally been implemented through a manual process of paper and pencil with little standardization throughout a Healthcare System. Each practice has asked patients specific questions to understand the patient’s health as it pertains to their specialty. These data were rarely shared and there has not been a comparison of patient’s health across different specialty domains. We sought to leverage interoperable electronic systems to provide a standardization of PRO assessments across sites of care. METHODS: University of Utah Health is comprised of four hospitals, 12 community clinics, over 400,000 unique annual patients, and more than 5000 providers. The enterprise wide implementation of PROs started in November of 2015. Patients can complete an assessment at home via email, or within the clinic on a tablet. Each specialty has the opportunity to add additional specialty-specific instruments. We customized the interval with which the patient answers the assessments based on specialty preference in order to minimize patient burden, while maximizing relevant data for clinicians. RESULTS: Barriers and facilitators were identified in three phases: Pre-implementation, Implementation, and Post-implementation. Each phase was further broken down into technical challenges, content inclusion and exclusion, and organizational strategy. These phases are unique and require collaboration between several groups throughout the organization with support from executive leadership. DISCUSSION: We are deploying system-wide standard and customized PRO collection with the goals of providing better patient care, improving physician-patient communication, and ultimately improving the value of the care given. Standardized assessment provides any clinician with information to quickly evaluate the overall, physical and mental health of a patient. This information is available real time to aid in patient communication for the clinician. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s41687-018-0059-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.