I don’t usually summarize stories from other publications — I don’t want to bore you! — and I like to offer you a surprise or two. This time, though, I thought you might want to hear about an interesting piece appearing in Modern Healthcare. This item offers some insight into how understanding patient-generated determinants of health could improve outcomes.
The story tells the tale of the Hospital for Special Surgery, an orthopedics provider in New York City which provides elective procedures to treat joint pain and discomfort. According to the MH editor, HSS has begun collecting data on patient-reported outcomes after procedures to see not only how much pain may remain, but also how their quality of life is post-procedure.
This project began by doing a check in with the patient before the procedure, during which nurses went over important information and answered any questions the patient might have. (As readers may know, this is a fairly standard approach to pre-surgical patient communication, so this was something of a warm-up.)
However, things got more interesting a few months later. For its next step, the hospital also began surveying the patients on their state of mind and health prior to the procedure, asking 10 questions drawn from the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System, or Promis.
The questions captured not only direct medical concerns such as pain intensity and sleep patterns, but also looked at the patient’s social support system, information few hospitals capture in a formal way at present.
All of the information gathered is being collected and entered into the patient’s electronic health record. After the procedure, the hospital has worked to see that the patients fill out the Promis survey, which it makes available using Epic’s MyChart portal.
Getting to this point wasn’t easy, as IT leaders struggled to integrate the results of the Promis survey into patient EHRs. However, once the work was done, the care team was able to view information across patients, which certainly has the potential to help them improve processes and outcomes over time.
Now, the biggest challenge for HSS is collecting data after the patients leave the hospital. Since kicking off the project in April, HSS has collected 24,000 patient responses to nursing questions, but only 15% of the responses came from patients who submitted them after their procedure. The hospital has seen some success in capturing post-surgical results when doctors push patients to fill out the survey after their care, but overall, the post-surgical response rate has remained low to date.
Regardless, once the hospital improves its methods for collecting post-surgical patient responses, it seems likely that the data will prove useful and important. I hope to see other hospitals take this approach.
