Patient Reported Outcome Measures

The purpose of the vast majority of medical interventions is to maintain or improve patient functioning and well-being. Consequently the intervention should have a positive impact upon the quality of life of the individual. Despite the obvious patient-centric perspective to the assessment of well-being the medical profession has not traditionally undertaken systematic evaluation of patient based reports. Medical professionals have tended to rely on questions such as, how does the patient feel or asking them to describe symptoms.

"We need to focus on outcomes and their robust, continuing measurement [to] give the NHS public health organisations and local government a benchmark for what the public expects to see from their health services."
Andrew Lansley MP, Health Secretary

However, clinicians and medical researchers are now well aware that they must measure quality of life alongside lab data. For this reason Patient Reported Outcome (PRO) measures are increasingly being used to quantify the quality of life or other outcome from the patient's perspective as part of the medical evaluation.

Isis Innovation has a growing portfolio of PROs developed within the Department of Public Health at Oxford University. The PRO portfolio from Isis is made up of condition-specific questionnaires aimed at assessing the outcome for patients being treated for a range of medical conditions including orthopaedics, Parkinson’s Disease, Endometriosis and Motor Neurone Disease. Condition specific PROs address issues of particular importance to the target patient group and are more sensitive to changes in the patient’s clinical status than generic PROs.