Implementing Patient Reported Outcome Measures in a Student-Faculty Clinic

  • Michael Milligan Harvard Medical School
  • David E. Wang
  • Yannis K. Valti
  • Chanan Reitblat
  • Esther H. Chung
  • Enrico G. Ferro
  • Eugene Vaios
  • Biqi Zhang
  • Mary K. Abel
  • Olive Tang
  • Marya Cohen

Abstract

Patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) capture patient perspectives of care, unfiltered by healthcare providers. By quantifying how care impacts each patient’s mental, physical, and social wellbeing, PROMs can serve as a powerful indicator of healthcare quality. While PROMs have been implemented in a number of hospital settings, their use in student-faculty clinics has not been reported. This manuscript thus describes the implementation of a novel set of PROMs questionnaires at the Crimson Care Collaborative (CCC) at Harvard Medical School (HMS). Based on our experiences and a thorough review of other PROMs implementations, we determined three main requirements for a successful launch: a specific approach tailored to each unique clinic setting, strong clinician buy-in, and widespread patient acceptance. Once implemented in our clinic, we discovered that PROMs benefitted medical education by increasing awareness of the social determinants of health, and encouraging students to broach difficult conversations. We expect that the continuous use of PROMs at CCC will inspire future quality improvement projects, and believe that our implementation experience can serve as a guide for other student-faculty clinics. 

Author Biography

Michael Milligan, Harvard Medical School
Michael Milligan is an MD/MBA Candidate at Harvard Medical School

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Published
2017-07-15
How to Cite
Milligan, M., Wang, D., Valti, Y., Reitblat, C., Chung, E., Ferro, E., Vaios, E., Zhang, B., Abel, M., Tang, O., & Cohen, M. (2017). Implementing Patient Reported Outcome Measures in a Student-Faculty Clinic. Free Clinic Research Collective, 3(1). Retrieved from https://www.themspress.org/journal/index.php/freeclinic/article/view/276
Section
Research