New publication: Using Patient Reported Outcomes to Improve Health Care

OHE’s Professor Nancy Devlin has co-authored a new book: Using Patient Reported Outcomes to Improve Health Care, published by Wiley, with colleagues Professor John Appleby (The King’s Fund) and Professor David Parkin (King’s College London).

OHE’s Professor Nancy Devlin has co-authored a new book: Using Patient Reported Outcomes to Improve Health Care, published by Wiley, with colleagues Professor John Appleby (The King’s Fund) and Professor David Parkin (King’s College London).

Patient reported outcomes (PROs) questionnaires provide a systematic way capturing and measuring patients’ views about their own health. PRO data are a powerful way of measuring the outcomes from health care as viewed by patients themselves – providing important evidence from the patients’ perspective to complement traditional clinical measures. 

Using Patient Reported Outcomes to Improve Health Care provides an introduction and overview of PRO instruments, and aims to stimulate thinking and discussion around opportunities, challenges, and next steps for collecting and using PRO data, routinely in health care systems, to drive improvements in the quality of health care. 

The book explores how PRO data can be used at the organisational level, to transform decision making and improve clinical practice. Further, the authors explain how PRO data could also be used by physicians and patients in deciding between treatment options in a clinical setting. The publication draws upon real life examples both in the English NHS and international case studies of the use of PROs in practice.

In a foreword to the book, Professor Kalipso Chalkidou (NICE international) stresses the importance and relevance of PROs: “They [PROs] can empower patients in making choices about their treatment…They can boost policy makers’ efforts in making sense of and tackling unwarranted variation within and across countries. They can help expose links between deprivation and health outcomes and help better target resources”.  

Sir Bruce Keogh (NHS England) adds: “Unravelling the relative utility of different PROMs [patient reported outcome measures] to patients, clinicians or institutions will require rigorous analysis. This book does just that”.

To buy a copy of the book, click here.

Full reference: Appleby, J., Devlin, N., Parkin, D., 2015. Using Patient Reported Outcomes to Improve Health Care. Chichester: Wiley.

For more information, contact Professor Nancy Devlin at OHE.