Fewer than one-fifth of U.S. hospitals indicate they regularly review the patient-reported measures to guide medical care, according to a new survey from Health Catalyst. That's despite Medicare forging ahead with its plan to incorporate patient-reported outcomes – PROs – in its new payment system.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, in fact, has already begun to calculate how much healthcare providers should be paid using the patient's own views of their health as a yardstick. It means that providers whose patients report significant improvements in health could be paid more than those whose patients report problems.
PROs were first incorporated into a new CMS program designed to lower the cost of knee and hip replacements. And the measures are bound to become more prevalent as a key piece of the proposed Merit-based Incentive Payment System that aims to restructure how Medicare pays for medical services.
[Also: AHRQ dedicates nearly two million for patient-centered outcomes research network]
"Patient-reported outcomes are critical to enabling healthcare's evolution from focusing on the volume of services delivered to the value created for patients," Health Catalyst senior vice president Paul Horstmeier said in a statement. "Their use promises seismic changes not only in the way providers are paid, but how they measure success, how patients choose their doctors, and most importantly how clinical outcomes are improved."
Health Catalyst conducted its online survey of 100 clinical and administrative executives in health systems of all sizes across the country and the research revealed that just 18 percent always use PROs to guide clinical care. But the analytics and data warehousing vendor also found that hospitals are preparing for the change. Nearly three-fourths – 72 percent – of survey takers indicated plans to use patient-reported outcomes within one to three years.
Like Healthcare Finance on Facebook
That said, survey respondents indicated time and money as chief barriers to deploying PROs. Other barriers included fitting PROs into clinicians workflow.
Among the 18 percent of participants who said their organizations are currently using PROs, 59 percent apply them to chronic care tracking and 58 percent to surgical interventions, while 27 percent use them for mental health purposes, and 22 percent for patients undergoing cancer treatments.
Hospitals and clinicians use PROs to gauge patient's quality of life, considering symptoms and cognitive, physical and social functioning.
"The question is no longer whether someone will survive, but how their life will be after treatment," added Caleb Stowell, MD, vice president of Standardization and Business Development for the International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement.
Twitter: @Bernie_HITN