In today's medical ecosystem, it is vital to measure the outcomes that are most important to the patients. As such, Patient-Reported Outcome Measurements (PROMS) can be an essential metric to deliver high-quality cardiovascular care, particularly in the subset of patients who remain disappointed with their outcomes.
PROMS should be a reproducible and reflective report of what is fundamental to a patient over time and across treatments with proper standards in the analysis, interpretation, and reporting of the collected data. These reports can also be sensitive to changes, whether improvements or deteriorations in the quality of care and medical attitude, but a lack of standardization makes it difficult to draw robust conclusions and compare findings across treatments.
As a research tool, PROMS can have a significant prognostic prominence, offering a powerful instrument of comparison between different treatment modalities. With the information technology (IT) abilities of today, we can leverage mobile tools and powerful computer systems to perform sophisticated data analysis using patient-derived data and randomization. This may eliminate guess work and generate impactful metrics to better inform the decision-making process. PROMS analyzed by proper standardized algorithms can avoid physician bias, and be integrated in the hospital team work.
Therefore, there is a strong need for integration of PROMS into the evaluation of cardiovascular interventions and procedures; and also, establish international standards in the analyses of Patient-Reported Outcomes and Quality of Life Data to address this need and develop therapeutic recommendations.