A tool designed to collect pre-appointment health outcome information from Nashville, Tenn.-based Vanderbilt University Medical Center patients has just reached its millionth report after launching in 2019.
With hitting this milestone, the tool — the Vanderbilt Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement System — has become one of the largest collections of patient survey data in the U.S., according to a June 1 news release.
As a self-reported outcome system, the survey gives clinicians insight into how their care is really affecting patient health and whether a patient is seeing improvements themselves. The data is recorded and then sent to the patient's electronic health record for providers and researchers to see and learn from.
"At its core, VPROMS is a clinician-patient communications tool,"Justin Bachmann, MD, a Vanderbilt cardiologist and director of patient-reported outcomes measurement said in a statement. "It's an effort by the Medical Center to listen to patients more effectively. PROMs are really one of the only objective forms of symptomatic data because everything else is interpreted by the clinician and put into the chart. This is a way to cut through that and find out how the patient is actually feeling."
The reporting tool can be used by any system that runs eStar, VUMC's EHR system.