Patient-reported outcome measures: an overview

Over the past few years there has been a fundamental shift in focus to give greater emphasis to the involvement of the patient in the care they receive and which is reflected in a number of policy and national initiatives. Patients also want to be involved in the decision making process. Against this background, both nationally and internationally, the assessment of outcomes based on the patient’s perspective using patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs), are increasingly accompanying the traditional clinical ways of measuring health and the effects of treatment on the patient. Furthermore, for more than a decade PROMs have played and continue to have an important role in national and international academic and clinical research, resulting in the development of many thousands of reliable and valid instruments to measure the patient’s self-reported health.