W2 – Patient reported outcome measures – what tools can be used?

Link to EAHP Statements

• Section 4 – Clinical Pharmacy: Statements – 4.1
• Section 6 – Education and Research: Statement – 6.4

ACPE UAN: 0475-0000-23-010-L04-P – An application-based activity  

Abstract

To assess the effects of clinical pharmacy interventions, in clinical practice or research projects, various outcome measures are being used. Examples of outcome measures include everything from “soft measures” such as satisfaction with services and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) to “hard measures” such as health service utilisation and mortality. When choosing an outcome measure it is essential to consider whether the intervention can indeed be expected to influence the proposed outcome(s). It has been suggested that the limited proof of effect for clinical pharmacy services such as medication reviews and efforts towards patient-education, -motivation, -partnership is mostly due to a lack of adapted outcome measures. Incidence of readmission is a commonly used outcome measure within the field of pharmacy practice research. This measure is however very multifactorial, affected by many aspects besides medicines optimisation, thus requiring large studies with long follow-up periods – and it remains uncertain to what degree these types of interventions actually influence hospitalisation.

A Patient-Reported Outcome Measure (PROM) is a report by a patient without a clinician’s interpretation. PROMs are being used more and more in line with healthcare striving to promote and practice in a person-centred manner. They aim to capture effects that are relevant and important for the individual, rather than the traditional medical and clinical effects.

HRQoL measures are often used to assess patient-reported outcomes. These measures, however, have been developed to evaluate the impact of disease burden on patients’ life, not specifically the impact of pharmacotherapy. Recently, several outcomes measurement tools have been developed which focus specifically on patient reported drug-related quality of life or drug-related satisfaction. In this workshop you will get familiar with some of them and learn about how they can be used to evaluate your clinical pharmacy services.

Learning objectives

After the session, the participant should be able to:   

• Be familiar with the content and intended scope of several PROMs focusing on pharmacotherapy
• Describe how PROMs may be used practically and what the challenges and opportunities may be
• Describe how effects of clinical pharmacy services can be analysed and reported using different PROMs

Educational need addressed

Clinical pharmacists provide cognitive services to patients and physicians with the aim to optimise patients’ pharmacotherapy, medication use and well-being. The effects of these services are difficult to measure in practice and in research and commonly used outcome measures are often not sensitive enough. There is therefore a need to find alternative measures (such as PROMs focusing on pharmacotherapy) that these services can actually have an influence on and that are of most relevance to the patients.

Keywords: Patient reported, outcome measures, research, clinical pharmacy services