Patient-reported outcomes: opportunities and challenges in Central Europe

Excerpt

Patient-reported outcomes (PRO) have become important instruments of healthcare and health policy making, as these can reflect patients’ feedbacks on healthcare outcomes. PROs can be used to evaluate the performance of healthcare systems and to enhance benchmarking and quality improvement of healthcare services [1]. There are valuable systematic collections of health data on the local and EU level that are used to monitor health developments in most EU countries. However, classical descriptive health statistics need to be complemented by measures that can be interpreted by and incorporated in health economic evaluations of new technologies. Applying PROs can make a better use of these regularly assessed data to inform health policy decisions. PROs are also cornerstones of medical decision making. PROs play an increasing role in the drug registration process being primary or secondary endpoints of multi-centric clinical trials. Initiation and cessation of treatments are based on PRO measurements in an increasing number of conditions, cutoff points are stated in international and national clinical and financial guidelines. …