Collecting patient-reported outcomes (PROs) is essential to high-quality care delivery. As the saying goes, “it’s impossible to improve what you can’t measure,” and collecting patient-reported data empowers healthcare providers to measure and benchmark their clinical outcomes. This level of analysis pushes medicine forward, ensuring clinical care practices continue to improve to benefit the patients that providers serve.
However, just as the value of collecting PROs has become increasingly apparent, so has market recognition of the need to help facilitate PRO collection and analysis. This need has led to a challenge for healthcare organizations - how to determine which vendor is best suited to achieve its outcomes-related objectives.
Whether looking to supplement clinical research or clinical practice, there are five key areas in which healthcare organizations can assess the value of a PRO software solution and whether their current partner is falling short of expectations.
Top Signs to Switch PRO Solutions
The cost exceeds the benefit
As your healthcare organization prioritizes efficient operations and high-quality care, ensuring cost-effective vendor solutions is imperative. However, suppose your PRO solution costs you more than it provides functionality and returns on investment. In that case, it’s time to explore other options – particularly those that bake fair pricing and high functionality into their business model.
The feedback loop between provider and patient is minimal or non-existent
What is the value of collecting data if you’re not empowered to act on it? A PRO solution should do more than just collect data. It should provide real-time insights to supplement clinical care. This means your PRO solution should ensure data is both accessible and actionable at the point of care.
The solution is disruptive to day-to-day workflows
As healthcare burnout continues to climb, clinicians cannot afford additional disruption to their day-to-day operations. If your PRO solution requires manual data entry, creates duplicative data, or doesn't integrate with your EHR, it’s adding to clinicians’ and clinical staff's ever-increasing administrative burden. Rather, it should complement existing workflows and offer flexibility and customizability down to the clinician level to ensure operations are enhanced, not hindered.
Poor customer service and product support
Healthcare organizations need more than plug-and-play solutions – they need strategic partners to help them achieve their evolving and complex organizational goals. However, if your solution partnership involves a slow onboarding, poor compliance, and limited expertise of how leading healthcare organizations measure, benchmark, and act on patient outcomes, it’s time to look elsewhere. Solutions supported by dedicated customer support resources help to ensure the success of your organization.
Poor scalability
Care delivery occurs across service lines and facilities – your PRO solution should scale in the same way. Don’t limit your ability to measure and improve patient outcomes to one department – make your PRO solution supports your organization as a whole.
