NHS urged to make more of new patient experience data
pharmafile | March 12, 2010 | News story | | NHS, PROMs, hc, king's fund
Healthcare bosses and clinicians have been urged to make the most of new patient experience data.
‘Getting the most out of PROMS: putting health outcomes at the heart of NHS decision-making’ suggests measuring improvements in patient health can address questions about productivity and performance in the NHS.
The report by the King’s Fund and Office of Health Economics comes a year after the English NHS started routinely collecting patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs).
King’s Fund chief economist and report co-author John Appleby says the data “goes way beyond asking about satisfaction or experience and gets to the heart of what the NHS is in business to do: improve patients’ health”.
“For the first time we have patients’ own assessments of their health before and after treatment – and by implication the quality of care they received from the NHS,” he adds.
But the report insists decision-makers must be prepared to act on what they learn – PROMs’ success will stand or fall on what policy-makers, commissioners, managers and clinicians do with them.
They will need to “make tough decisions about services that are low quality, ineffective or poor value-for-money, and to promote practices and services that benefit patients the most”, it concludes.
The thinktanks believe primary care trusts can strengthen commissioning by using PROMs to assess value.
Clinical teams can also benchmark and improve their performance, thus improving productivity as the financial squeeze starts to bite.
However, the report is not entirely in thrall to PROMs data, pointing out that while it needs to be analysed and reported in a useful fashion, the cost of collecting, processing and reporting it also has to be considered against the benefits.
‘PROMs have been used for years in clinical trials and most recently by Bupa to evaluate quality of care,” Appleby goes on.
“However, if PROMs are really going to work within our health service, NHS leaders must start to engage both staff and patients in understanding and acting on the results of these new data.”
According to the report, PROMs could inform NHS decision-making at all levels, including:
• Patients’ decisions about their treatment
• Commissioners’ decisions about allocation of resources
• Hospital management of resources and technical efficiency
• The management and monitoring of patients in clinical practice
The report makes it clear that PROMs should add to, rather than replace, existing measures of quality and performance.
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