Abstract
Delivering high-quality surgical care requires knowing how best to define and measure
quality in surgery. Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) enable surgeons, health care
systems, and payers to understand meaningful health outcomes from the patient's perspective
and can be measured using patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs). As a result,
there is much interest in using PROMs in routine surgical care, to guide quality improvement
and to inform reimbursement pay structures. This chapter defines PROs and PROMs, differentiates
PROMs from other quality measures such as patient-reported experience measures, describes
PROMs in the context of routine clinical care, and provides an overview of interpreting
PROM data. This chapter also describes how PROMs may be applied to quality improvement
and value-based reimbursement in surgery.
Keywords
patient-reported outcomes - patient-reported outcome measures - quality of life -
surgical quality