eHealthier’s Primary Care Platform enables GPs and Allied Health Professionals to capture and more effectively monitor and treat their patients’ Health Related Quality of Life (HRQoL).
We do this by having patients complete Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) as a routine part of their treatment. Monitoring patient health outcomes throughout treatment is the essence of outcomes medicine.
Using preventive and protective patient population PROMs, health care providers have a new patient-centred methodology to enable practices to qualify and easily and accurately manage the requirements of the Australian Government’s Practice Incentives Program Quality Improvement Incentive (PIP QI).
Increasing numbers of physicians have long been interested in PROMs and some strongly advocate for their use in clinical practice. See our blog article for some examples, and also here.
As early as 2004, Appleby and Delvin noted many examples of clinicians using these data to inform and monitor their own clinical practice. This included;
- Examining PROMs data before treatment and using them as a base for discussing treatment options with patients
- Helping them answer questions what works? What does not work?
- Helping to detect health problems that might otherwise be missed
- Monitoring disease progression
- Facilitate patient-clinician communication
- Monitoring outcomes to improve quality
This is also known as Routine Health Outcomes Measurement.
For Australian GPs two Medicare Item Groups of Services currently exist that facilitate the utilisation of PROMs. These are :
- Mental Health Care Plans
Part of the requirements for GP’s assessing and administering such care plans is that they utilise an outcome measurement tool. These outcome measurement tools are now available as PROMs which enable graphic printouts of progressive scores over time. This enables the GP to determine if the psychological intervention has been effective in improving the patient’s mental health care status. - Chronic Disease Management Care Plans and Health Assessments
Often carried out with the assistance of the practice nurse these PROMs would allow the practice nurse to ensure the effectiveness of these care plans in improving the patient’s Health Related Quality of Life (HRQoL)
OUTCOMES MEDICINE
Primary care physicians interested in practicing PROM or Outcomes Medicine should benefit from utilising the four types of PROMs available from eHealthier. These are:
- Preventive PROMs
- Functional PROMs
- “Cared-For” PROMs
- Longevity PROMs