Digital PROMS – Better patient insights, part of our approach to Value Based Healthcare
Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan has embarked on an ambitious programme to introduce the collection of Electronic Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMS) working with My Clinical Outcomes (MCO).
This programme, grounded in our approach to Value Based Healthcare, will not only help transform the collection of patient data via a digital platform; it will provide greater insight into how we can make improvements to treatments informed by what patients tell us about their physical health and wellbeing.
Putting patients at the centre of healthcare, this collaboration results in the collection and aggregation of data that supports joint decision making with patients on their care, this work will help inform how to shape services over time with a clear aim to deliver better outcomes for patients at reduced cost
The MCO platform automates the collection and analysis of Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs), survey-like health assessments completed by patients in English or Welsh that are used to evaluate their conditions and evaluate their healthcare experiences.
The approach has already proven to be a success for individual specialties across the NHS, including the Sussex Cancer Centre at the Royal Sussex County Hospital where patients with treatable but not curable cancers became less likely to be admitted to hospital, and have shorter hospital stays, when using the MCO platform.
Cardiff and Vale University Health Board has ambitions to realise the same benefits on a much larger scale through embarking on an organisation-wide implementation of the platform, across approximately 50 clinical teams.
Professor Meriel Jenney, Executive Medical Director at Cardiff and Vale University Health Board, said: “This platform will help us improve the quality of care we can offer patients at an individual level while at the same time focusing and tailoring services to match their needs. We aim to reduce the burden on teams and realise these benefits across all of our services, knowing the evidence supports improved outcomes as part of Value In Health Care.”
The My Clinical Outcomes platform has already been implemented in a number of Cardiff and Vale UHB’s specialties, including the South Wales Neuroendocrine Tumour (NET) service.
The service has manually collected PROMs since 2017 as part of a transformation programme, seeing patient satisfaction rates soar to 97 per cent, winning and receiving nominations for a string of awards, and securing European Centre of Excellence status after halving diagnosis times and reducing misdiagnosis of NETs.
Digitizing the process through the My Clinical Outcomes platform is enhancing individualised clinical care, guiding the timing and interval of follow-ups with patients directly in line with their individual needs.
Enabling the service to optimise prioritising patients and allocating outpatient appointment slots, the new platform will make the service increasingly efficient, easing the burden on medical and nursing resource within it.
Lead of the South Wales Neuroendocrine Cancer Service, Dr Mohid Khan, said: “Collecting PROMs has been pivotal to the transformation of the South Wales Neuroendocrine Tumour Service in recent years in achieving international centre of excellence status. Optimising the efficiency of how we do this through the Health Board’s new digital platform is already showing to have remarkable, positive outcomes.”
“We are seeing the quality of care we are able to offer patients at an individual level increase while at the same time focusing and tailoring services to match their needs. The potential for reducing burden on teams and realising those benefits right across all of our services is a genuinely noteworthy prospect.”
In our Primary Mental Health Support Service, which is for people aged 18 or over living with common mental health difficulties, such as depression and anxiety. We aim to contact each person within 28 days of a referral to offer an assessment, usually on the phone; after the assessment each person may be offered information and advice, signposted to a wide number of local services, offered interventions from the team, or referred on to another NHS team
We are using PROMS to give us information prior to assessment, potentially identifying need and risk that might otherwise be overlooked in a brief primary care assessment. Part of a wider transformation, MCO, alongside SMS messaging has improved turnaround from referral to assessment to under ten days.
Since MCO was introduced, waiting targets have been consistently met and the partnership has been instrumental in this.
The ability to store and analyse PROMS collected in a standardized way in a single data repository facilitates reduced variation which should reduce costs.
Dr Tim Williams, founder of MCO said: “Making digital PROMs part of routine clinical care helps patients to make more informed decisions, helps their clinical teams to better understand and address their needs, and helps services to ensure the best possible outcomes for all. We’re thrilled to have been selected to roll-out My Clinical Outcomes at Cardiff and Vale UHB and look forward to onboarding new clinical teams and to making the platform as widely available to patients as possible.”
Cardiff and Vale University Health Board patients will be invited to use the My Clinical Outcomes platform as it becomes available for their speciality. For more information, please speak to your clinician.