Health care providers are cautiously kicking the tires on a major government initiative designed to drive better medical outcomes: patient-reported outcomes.

Patient-reported outcomes were the creation of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in the agency’s ongoing quest to find ways to base medical reimbursements on the merits of treatment. These are essentially verbal or written reports from patients describing how they think their treatment either helped or hurt them.

To find out if health care organizations were eliciting this information from patients, Salt Lake City, Utah-based health care consultant Health Catalyst sought input from officials at 100 U.S. health care providers.

The outcome: No one is rushing to attend this party. Overall, just 18 percent say they have integrated patient-reported outcomes into their health care assessment system. That, says Health Catalyst’s Paul Horstmeier, is going to have to change if the effects of patient-reported outcomes on patient health are to be realized.

“Patient-reported outcomes are critical to enabling healthcare's evolution away from focusing on the volume of services delivered to the value created for patients,” says Horstmeier, senior vice president of Health Catalyst. “Their use promises seismic changes not only in the way providers are paid, but how they measure success, how patients choose their doctors, and most importantly how clinical outcomes are improved. Yet with few exceptions our nation's hospitals are unprepared for the shift and need help managing this new priority within the ever-shifting field of time-intensive regulatory requirements.”

What’s holding up the adoption of patient-reported outcomes? The survey found four primary culprits:

Time and/or money to gather the data: 36 percent.
Difficulty integrating data collection into the daily clinical routine: 26 percent.
Limited technology: 15 percent.
Organizational resistance to change: 10 percent.

For the 18 percent that have adopted patient-reported outcomes, the most common reasons for doing so were:

Chronic-care tracking: 59 percent.
Surgical interventions: 58 percent.
Mental health tracking: 27 percent.
Cancer patient symptom tracking: 22 percent.

Even though the survey found that adoption of patient-reported outcomes is extremely low to date, it won’t be long before plenty more organizations are using the data, Health Catalyst said. When it asked respondents whether they planned to integrate patient-reported outcomes into their systems in the next one to three years, 72 percent say they plan to do so.

Instant Insights /

Few clinics gathering patient-reported outcome data

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