PROMS developer wants national roll-out

A clinician at Trafford Healthcare NHS Trust, who created a web-based tool that collects patient reported outcome measures, wants to roll it out nationally.

PROMS 2.0, which is being used in 14 health organisations in the North West of England, was created by orthopaedic surgeon Dr Bibhas Roy.

“Our effort is now on creating a national network that will accept this as a clinical tool which is affecting patient care directly,” he told a PROMS Summit in Manchester last week.

Doctors at Trafford General Hospital originally developed the tool in 2011 to capture information about patients who had undergone shoulder surgery.

One of the aims was to cut out follow up appointments that were scheduled simply so that outcome data could be collected.

The tool is now being used across specialities including orthopaedics, diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and mental health.

The PROMS 2.0 software lists patients in a database and generates questionnaires for them to answer both before and after surgery.

The system can suggest whether another trip to the clinic is necessary, based on the data. Dr Roy said: “I recently analysed my own data and found that 88% of my patients who are eligible don’t come back.”

PROMS were introduced to the NHS in 2009, following a review of the health service by Lord Ara Darzi. However, they have only ever been applied to four procedures, and Dr Roy said their focus was too narrow.

He argued that the idea could be rolled out to any intervention where a validated PROM can be applied.

“This is not about the Department of Health telling organisations and providers to collect data; this is about clinicians deciding that they’ve got to do it to help patients.

“We’ve been trained to work on the principle of evidence based practice. This is based on capturing a sample of the information and look at the results.

“The days of samples are over, we can capture everything now. Evidence based practice needs to change to practice based evidence.”

PROMS 2.0, was developed collaboration with developer Bluespier International and is now also being piloted in mental health.

Dr Asad Sadiq, a psychiatrist from Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust has just received a £15,000 grant from the Regional Innovation Fund to develop the PROMS 2.0 for mental health, which will include a suicide alert functionality.

“In my clinical practice there are no effective outcome measures. I only see patients every six months and they might be fine then, but I’d quite like to know how they’re doing in the interim period,” he said. Dr Sadiq will start training clinicians on using the tool in January next year.