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Summary statistics for Patient-reported Outcome Measures: the improvement ratio

Szilard Nemes, Meridith E Greene, Erik Bulow, Ola Rolfson

Abstract


Rationale, aims and objective: Patient-reported outcomes measures (PROMs) can facilitate objective comparisons of alternative treatments and can aid clinicians, researchers, decision-makers and members of the general public in gauging different healthcare providers’ performance. However, this assumes an easy to use and understand summary measure.

Methods: Using PROMs (EQ-5D index, EQ VAS and VAS Pain) from 1799 patients in 7 Swedish hospitals with at least 200 hip arthroplasty surgeries in 2009, we illustrated the possibility of summarizing pre- and post-treatment PROM values with the help of a simple index. This index expressed the attained improvement as a percentage of the total possible improvement. Change score, Cohen’s effect size and Standardized Response Means served as alternative measures.

Results: The Improvement Ratio index proved capable of offering a vivid and easy to understand summary of healthcare providers’ performance. The alternative measures indicated similar patterns as the Improvement Index. The routines of statistical inference made possible null-hypothesis testing of the improvement in different groups or testing for trends.

Conclusions: This simple improvement index gives an easy to understand summary measure that appeals not only to researchers, but also to laymen for consulting healthcare provider comparisons or countrywide white papers. We recommend using the Improvement Ratio index to summarize the PROMs outcome of elective surgeries.


Keywords


Arthoplasty, measurement precision, outcome interpretation, Patient-reported Outcome Measures, person-centered healthcare, quality improvement, socioeconomic factors

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5750/ejpch.v3i3.1000

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