Patient-Reported Outcomes and Experience
Patient-reported outcomes and experience is the area of quality and patient safety concerned with measuring health and care from the patient's own perspective. It brings together patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs), patient experience and satisfaction measures, health-related quality of life, and shared decision-making — instruments and concepts that capture how patients feel, function, and engage, complementing clinical and administrative measures of quality.
Definition
Patient-reported outcomes and experience refers to the family of measures and practices that elicit information about health status, functioning, well-being, care processes, and decision involvement directly from patients, without interpretation by clinicians, for use in quality assessment, research, and care.
Scope
The area orients the reader to four connected topics: standardized questionnaires that record symptoms, functioning, and well-being directly from patients; surveys that capture what happened during care and how patients judged it; multidimensional assessment of quality of life; and the processes by which patients and clinicians share information and decisions. It treats these as measurement and reference topics within health-policy and quality science, not as clinical instructions.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- What aspects of health and care can be validly captured directly from patients rather than from clinicians or records?
- How do patient-reported outcomes differ from patient experience measures, and how do both relate to quality of life?
- How is the patient's voice incorporated into quality measurement and into clinical decisions?
Key concepts
- Patient-reported outcome measure (PROM)
- Patient-reported experience measure (PREM)
- Health-related quality of life
- Patient-centred care
- Shared decision-making
- Triple Aim
Clinical relevance
Measures in this area are increasingly used alongside clinical and process indicators to describe the quality of care, and the evidence reviewed here links better patient experience with better clinical safety and effectiveness. The topics describe how the patient perspective is measured and incorporated into care and policy; they are reference material on measurement, not guidance for individual diagnosis or treatment.
Evidence & guidelines
A systematic review by Doyle and colleagues found consistent positive associations between patient experience and clinical safety and effectiveness across settings, supporting the use of patient-reported measures within quality frameworks. Conceptual statements such as Berwick and colleagues' Triple Aim and Barry and Edgman-Levitan's account of shared decision-making frame why the patient perspective sits at the centre of contemporary quality and patient-safety thinking.
Key figures
- Nick Black
- Donald Berwick
- Michael Barry
Related topics
Seminal works
- black-2013
- doyle-2013
- berwick-2008
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between a patient-reported outcome and a patient experience measure?
- A patient-reported outcome captures the patient's own report of health status, symptoms, or functioning (for example, pain or mobility), while a patient experience measure captures what happened during care and how the patient judged that process (for example, whether clinicians explained things clearly).
- Why include the patient's perspective in quality measurement at all?
- Clinical and administrative records cannot capture how patients feel, function, or judge their care; patient-reported measures add this perspective, and reviewed evidence links better patient experience with better clinical outcomes.