Development of Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROM)

In the book “Redefining Health Care”, 2006 the authors Michael E. Porter and Elisabeth O. Teisberg introduced the concept of value-based health care. This means that health care should be oriented in such a way that it creates “value” for patients. Value is defined as the outcome of health divided by the costs spent on it.^[1] The value calculation also includes, for instance, patient-reported outcomes. Ultimately, healthcare is to be focused on the value and the composition of the endpoint categories.^[2] Up to now, healthcare has only paid attention to the endpoint categories mortality, i.e., the number of deaths from a certain disease per 1,000 people per year, and morbidity, i.e., the number of people who fall ill in a population per year.^[2] Based on their own conviction that PROs in particular have a great additional benefit for healthcare, Porter and Teisberg, together with the Boston Consulting Group, founded the ICHOM in 2012 to collect these PROs.

ICHOM – that stands for International Consortium for Health Outcome Measurements, based in Boston, USA, develops the necessary tools to measure Patient Reported Outcomes together with patients, physicians and other industry experts. These are standardised questionnaires, so-called standard sets, which patients fill out themselves, depending on the target group and disease.^[3,4] These standard sets are then used to measure subjective endpoints of therapies on the patients’ perceived quality of life. The result is then comparable in the same target group or among patients with the same disease.