New Methods To Efficiently Collect Patient Reported Outcome Measures (Proms) For Cataract Surgery

Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) are robust questionnaires that are designed to comprehensively evaluate a patient’s improvement in quality of life as a result of clinical care. PROMs are invaluable and play a vital part in the development of value-based medicine. This data has traditionally been collected by filling in paper questionnaires. The difficulty we currently face is in obtaining this data quickly and efficiently with low clinician involvement. This study aims to evaluate three methods of PROMs data collection – traditional paper against two digital platforms – ‘DrDoctor’ and ‘MyClinicalOutcomes’ (MCOs). Ultimately, with the aim to identify the optimal data collection tool.

All patients were in the cataract service under the care of Moorfields Croydon. The traditional paper questionnaires were completed in clinic following consultation. The digital platforms were both remote – patients were sent the questionnaires electronically via text and/or email depending on the platform.

Patients seen in Moorfields Croydon’s cataract clinic and listed for surgery were asked to fill out a PROMs questionnaire. Three methods for data collection were used for a period of six months. The first method was a traditional paper questionnaire that patients filled out after the clinic consultation. The other two methods were digital via the DrDoctor and MCOs platforms. MCOs required patients to register to the platform before questionnaires could be sent to them electronically. DrDoctor automatically sent all patients who attended a clinic appointment a questionnaire via a text message. The main outcome of focus was the response rate over a set period. We also made a note of any technical difficulties encountered across all platforms.

The results found that over a period of six months, the paper questionnaires had a response rate of 25% with 240 patients being asked and 60 patients completing the questionnaire. In the digital platform, DrDoctor, had a response rate of 36% with 551 questionnaires being sent and 197 being completed. MCOs had a sign-up rate of 9%, with 75 patients out of 832 signing up to the platform. These 75 patients completed 152 surveys. Although the response rate was an important outcome, it did not fully reflect other factors such as ease of collection.

Digital methods of data collection do not always have higher response rates than traditional paper methods as shown by MCOs sign up rate of 9%. However, certain digital platforms can be superior to paper surveys as shown by DrDoctor.

This difference maybe because patients found the DrDoctor interface more user-friendly and did not require any prior registration unlike MCOs. This is supported by more patients requiring telephone assistance from clinicians to complete their registration on MCOs.

It appears that digital methods of data collection are not always the best for response rate but can be superior to traditional paper methods. Using the correct digital platform seems to be the key to efficienctly collecting PROMs data.