Healthcare payment models have been increasingly evolving to include quality performance in determining reimbursement. For example, the Medicare program, including Medicare Advantage, is today littered with quality performance measurement. Measuring quality in healthcare is, however, not as simple or straight forward as frequently assumed. Among other challenges, measures developed to date overwhelming measure healthcare process, not outcomes. Providers typically report on measure sets unique to each payer causing them undue collection and reporting burden, which measure is attributed to which provider can be or is an inexact and under pay for performance agreements comparatively higher quality scores does not always translate to comparatively greater financial reward. Because of these problems and related others, Patient Reported Outcome Measures (or PROMs) are increasingly seen as a solution. They reduce provider reporting burden, they are largely outcome based, are more responsive to patient care goals, help to better engage or activate the patient, PROMs data can be, or is, reported real time and can enable more efficient and more timely care delivery.
During this 27 minute conversation Dr. Tim Williams discusses how/why My Clinical Outcomes was formed, how PROMs measures are used in the clinical practice setting and for primarily what disease conditions, what opportunities or advantages they present to improve care delivery and outcomes, the extent to which they've been adopted in the UK, and what might American payers and providers learn from My Clinical Outcomes' PROMs experience.
Dr. Tim Williams is currently CEO (and cofounder) of My Clinical Outcomes a London-based, an IT company that automates for health care providers, via a web-based platform, the collection and analysis of Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs). He founded My Clinical Outcomes in 2011 to help bridge the gap in patient-centered care data available to inform clinical care. Previously, Dr. Williams worked as a physician for the UK's National Health Service and as a healthcare management consulting also for the NHS.
For more information on My Clinical Outcomes go to: http://www.myclinicaloutcomes.com/.
See also this recent April 19 essay by Dr. Williams and myself in The Health Care Blog, "Patient Reported Outcome Measures: Progress Across the Pond," at: http://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2018/04/19/patient-reported-outcome-measures-progress-across-the-pond/.
Dr. Tim Williams Discusses the Use of Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) in the United Kingdom: May 8th