A New Way to Listen to Patients: Heeding Patient Reported Experiences to Improve Quality of Care

Person-centred care (PCC) places the person first by providing care that is respectful and responsive to individual preferences, needs, and values and in turn guides all clinical decisions. Although this may seem obvious, in reality most health systems actually require patients to adapt to and navigate an established structure, rather than listening to what patients have to say, and involving them in decision-making. PCC, when done correctly, improves the experience people have with care, encourages more involvement in decisions, impacts health outcomes, reduces the use of services influencing the cost of care, and improves the satisfaction of the professionals who provide the care. PCC is achieved by integrating clinical data with both impartially collected patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) and patient-reported experience measures (PREMs). Whereas PROMs are captured by standardized, validated questionnaires that can be either generic (such as the Short Form-36) or disease-specific (such as the Seattle Angina Questionnaire), PREMs examine how processes of care impact patient experience. PREMs are designed to be objective rather than subjective, but still manage to capture functional (eg, experience with the physical environment and hospital facility) and relational (eg, interaction with health care providers) information. Therefore, both PROMs and PREMs play critical roles in the evaluation and delivery of high-quality patient care. One of the challenges is how to collect these data broadly and yet inexpensively.