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Clinical measures of health outcomes, such as x rays and lab tests, may have little
relevance to the day-to-day functioning of patients with chronic diseases.
Often, the best way patients can judge the effectiveness of treatments is by
changes in their symptoms.
This feedback or data is called Patient Reported Outcomes.
Health care decision making should be based on the needs of our patients.
So it's really important for a practicing physician or a clinical researcher to be able
to really understand what our patients are trying to tell us.
But actually communicating to your physician isn't as easy as it sounds.
PROMIS, the acronym PROMIS, stands for
Patient Reported Outcome Measurement Information System.
I know that's a mouthful.
But what it is really in simple terms, it's a dynamic tool to measure outcomes
from the patient perspective.
Part of PROMIS is questionnaires, or banks of questions, that have already been used to
collect and measure information from patients.
The PROMIS project is getting more and more attention, and we're receiving a lot of
interest from clinical researchers really not only around the country
but around the world.
Probably the most important difference is that PROMIS is built on something
called item response theory.
Item response theory, we might be familiar with, has been used for quite some time now in
educational testing, but it's fairly new in the field of health care.
What item response theory does then is allows you to get better answers from patients
with fewer questions, so in other words, there's less patient burden.
One of the more interesting and perhaps unexpected developments is that people are
interested in using patient-reported outcome measures in clinical practice itself, not
just clinical research.
Somebody like myself might give patients a PROMIS measure, a small, short measure,
perhaps while they're waiting in the waiting room.
And then using great technology, I could actually see the results by the time that they
come in and see me and understand more about how they're doing, including their level of
depression, their level of fatigue, or perhaps how they're functioning.
And there is standardization and reliability for researchers and clinicians.
At the end of the day, it's about getting the highest quality comprehensive information
so that we can understand our patients and do a better job to
improve their quality of care.
The PROMIS initiative is an NIH program funded through the NIH Common Fund.
Common Fund Programs reflect priorities for the NIH as a whole.
For more information on PROMIS, visit www.nihpromis.org.