By TIM WILLIAMS & DAVID INTROCASO

This past October CMS Administrator Seema Verma announced the agencys Meaningful Measures initiative.[1] Ms. Verma launched the initiative because, she admitted, the agencys current quality measurement programming, widely criticized for years by MedPAC and others, ran the risk of outweighing the benefits. Under Meaningful Measures, CMS will, Ms. Verma stated, put patients first by aligning a smaller number of outcome-based quality measures meaningful to patients across Medicares programs. Since the primary focus of a patient visit, Ms. Verma said, must be the patient, the primary focus of the initiative will be to focus health care quality efforts on what is really important to patients.[2] As an indication of this commitment, immediately after Meaningful Measures was announced the National Quality Forums (NQFs) Measures Application Partnership (MAP) began work reviewing a record number of CMS-recommended Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs).[3]

There appears to be an ever increasing interest in PROMS in the US. For example, last year The New England Journal of Medicine published three PROMs-related Perspective essays that moreover described initial success by a few early US PROMs adopters. One of these essays also noted that England and Scotland had extensive experience in the use of these measures.[4] Though possibly overstated, we believe providers in the US can benefit from, for example, our experience in the United Kingdom (UK) developing and implementing My Clinical Outcomes (MCO) (at: http://www.myclinicaloutcomes.com), a digital patient reported outcomes measurement and analytics platform that is now used in the treatment of several chronic conditions in a variety of clinical settings across the UK.

MCO was initially developed in collaboration with orthopedic surgeons working in the National Health Service (NHS). These surgeons were seeking a way to systematically follow-up with their patients after joint replacement surgery largely in order to better economize on their use of clinical resources or more appropriately or efficiently identify those patients in need of follow up face-to-face consultations. The web-based platform was developed to work flexibly around existing clinical work flows.

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