Quality of Life and Patient-Centered Outcomes

Abstract

Patient-centered care is a major design feature of contemporary healthcare and actionable strategies are needed to operationalize it in clinical practice. The patient experience of symptoms, functional status, quality of life, and health behaviors inform many aspects of care including disease screening and surveillance, treatment planning, shared decision-making, and patient self-management. The use of patient-reported outcomes can improve the functioning of multidisciplinary care teams, guide population health management efforts, and provide common metrics for systematic healthcare quality improvement. Health care delivery adaptations during the COVID-19 pandemic promoted the use of mobile health technology for collection of patient-reported outcomes (PRO) and accelerated standardizing asynchronous data collection for the surveillance of acute and chronic conditions. Current challenges to the widespread deployment of patient-reported outcome measures include efficient integration of tools into existing clinical workflows, deploying clinical decision-making support at point of care, and developing system-level data use strategies.