ePROs Toolkit: Advancing Clinical Care through the Patient Voice
Capturing the patient voice through electronic patient-reported outcomes (ePROs) is a growing part of care delivery. Using ePROs in clinical care requires change across the health system, including activities of governance, design, integration, and ongoing evaluation. This toolkit provides evidence-based guidelines and tools that can help healthcare systems successfully integrate ePROs in clinical care. The guidelines in this toolkit are organized around three core topic areas: ePRO Governance, ePRO Integration, and ePRO Reporting.
Getting Started
The toolkit is designed to help healthcare systems govern, integrate, and report ePRO data for clinical care delivery.
This toolkit has been developed based on our team’s experience in the study and application of ePRO tools across multiple settings. The guidelines were developed iteratively and integrate evidence, findings from the literature, prospective data collection, and direct health system implementation experience, along with expert opinion from stakeholders who have a known interest or experience in ePRO implementation for clinical care.
Who Should Use This Guide
The target audience for this toolkit is health system stakeholders who are considering initiating or expanding ePROs for care delivery across the health system.
This may include administrators, governance committee members, clinicians and other care team members, information technology (IT) and informatics professionals, patient advocates, and software designers and developers. This toolkit may also be relevant for health system professionals involved in marketing, patient experience, and change management. This toolkit is not targeted toward the actual development of new ePRO software or patient-reported outcome measures, or toward formal research on ePRO use, although there may be content relevant to readers interested in these topics.
How to Use This Guide
While this toolkit reflects our experiences developing and applying ePRO tools across a large health system, we recognize that every healthcare system and site is different.
Rather than provide a prescription for how to implement ePROs, we present what we have learned from experience as guidelines for other healthcare systems engaged in similar work. For users interested in understanding the big picture, we recommend reviewing the toolkit in its entirety before launching ePRO use. Users may wish to refer back to individual guidelines or sections in more detail than others, and many aspects will need to be considered continuously or concurrently.
