Dr Justin Bachmann on the Importance of Patient-Reported Outcomes in Cardiology

Patient-reported outcomes can be critically important, said Justin Bachmann, MD, MPH, FACC, instructor of Medicine and Health Policy at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Transcript

What is the importance of patient-reported outcomes in cardiology and how can they be better incorporated into payment models?

I think, I’m a little bit biased because a do a little research in this area, but I think patient-reported outcomes are critically important certainly to cardiologists and medicine at large. Patient-reported outcomes focus on what is important to patients, outcomes that matter to patients, what is the patient’s quality of life, how are they feeling, how functional are patients, how much time can they spend with their families. These are things that are critically important above and beyond traditional outcomes such as mortality and readmissions.

We have some very good ones in cardiology. We have PROMs, patient-reported outcome measures, that have been developed by John Spertus, MD, MPH, who is really one of the fathers of patient-reported outcome measures from Kansas City. John developed the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire and the Seattle Angina Questionnaire. These are questionnaires that are highly predictive of mortality and readmissions and also measure quality of life. These are measures that very easily integrated into any kind of value-measured program.

Other PROMs are being developed to focus on conditions such as atrial fibrillation and you start combining those with more general measures of quality of life and NIH [National Institutes of Health] is are developing some of these. They’re called the PROMIS measures. You really have the underpinnings of a very robust measuring system.