Patient-Reported Experiences (PREs) and Patient-Reported Experience Measures (PREMs): What value do they provide and how can we collect them?

by Tarek Milla, December 9, 2021

Recently we have become accustomed to hearing about the importance of involving the patient in the management of his or her disease. The purpose of this is to use the patient’s own data to adapt and improve research, the management of the healthcare process, the care offered to the patient, and the treatments. All this impacts the health and quality of life of the patients in a positive way.

As we already know, to achieve this we use PROs (Patient-Reported Outcomes) and PREs (Patient-Reported Experiences), indicators that are gaining ground and becoming more important in the healthcare environment.

Previously we wrote about the role played by PROs and PROMs (Patient-Reported Outcome Measures) in this process. Now we are going to focus on the value provided by PREs and PREMs (Patient-Reported Experience Measures), and the differences from the first two measures.

What are PREs?

Patient-Reported Experiences or PREs bring together the perceptions of the patients about their experiences while they are receiving medical care. Examples of PREs are waiting time, access to and ability to navigate through the services, participation (patient and physician) in decision-making, quality of communication, among others. This information is collected with validated surveys or questionnaires called PREMs (Patient-Reported Experience Measures).

PREMs are different from PROMs in their focus on measuring the impact that the healthcare process has on the patient’s experience, and not the health outcomes, as noted in the publication “Patient-reported outcome measures and patient-reported experience measures”. As such, they are an indicator of the quality of care received by the patient. These data become key information for adapting the processes and centering them on the patients’ needs.

In this way, these data can be used for research, quality improvement projects, evaluation of the physician’s performance, auditing, and economic evaluation.

This was seen in a study carried out in Italy between 2017 and 2019, where more than twenty-one hospitals in two regions collected this information, resulting in a satisfying process that improved the service and management of patients in the hospitals, as noted in the article “Using patient-reported measures to drive change in healthcare: the experience of the digital, continuous and systematic PREMs observatory in Italy”.

Our platform Caaring® allows us to respond to these needs by collecting this kind of information directly from the patient, using PREMs that provide data about the patient during the healthcare process that could be subsequently used for the improvement of the care and services offered in clinics and hospitals. In addition, this information can also be completed with PROMs, offering a holistic view of the patient’s status during his or her illness, facilitating clinical decision-making.

In this way, it is safe to say that the data reported by the patients about their experience are a source of relevant information for the healthcare environment, as they can be used as the basis for the implementation of improvements in hospital care, in turn improving the wellbeing of the patients.

#PatientReportedExperiences #PatientReportedExperienceMeasures #PREMs

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