Patient-reported outcome

A patient-reported outcome (PRO) is a health outcome directly reported by the patient who experienced it. It stands in contrast to an outcome reported by someone else, such as a physician-reported outcome, a nurse-reported outcome, and so on. PRO methods, such as questionnaires, are used in clinical trials or other clinical settings, to help better understand a treatment's efficacy. The use of digitized PROs, or electronic patient-reported outcomes (ePROs), is on the rise in today's health research industry.

PROs should not be confused with PCOs, or patient-centered outcomes. The latter implies the use of a questionnaire covering issues and concerns that are specific to a patient. Instead, patient-reported outcomes refers to reporting situations in which only the patient provides information related to a specific treatment or condition; this information may or may not be of concern to the patient.

Further, PROs should not be confused with PREMs (patient reported experience measures), which focus more on a patient's overall experience versus a focus on specific treatment outcomes.

The term PROs is becoming increasingly synonymous with "patient reported outcome measures" (PROMs).

PRO is an umbrella term that covers a whole range of potential measurements, but it specifically refers to "self-reporting" by the patient. PRO data may be collected via self-administered questionnaires, which the patient completes themselves, or through patient interviews. The latter will only qualify as a PRO, however, if the interviewer is gaining the patient's views and not using the responses to make a professional assessment or judgment of the impact of a treatment on the patient's condition. Thus, PROs are used as a means of gathering patient- rather than clinical- or other outcomes perspectives. The patient-reported perspective can be an important asset in gaining treatment or drug approval.

Recently, several consumer sites were created to gather patient-reported outcome data. These sites function like review sites, but they collect, organize, and store voluntary patient reported outcomes responses. Two of the sites trying to collect patient-outcomes data in a methodical way are Health Outcome, which stores/presents ratings for and responses to orthopedic treatments, such as lower back pain, and the site Iodine, which carries patient ratings for drugs, like Xanax for instance. These sites already have more patient outcome data than any other public database, and their collection is growing daily.

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