Patient-reported outcome measures: what do the people say?
Reviewed by Anna Volkmer

Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) assess and quantify health outcomes from the patient’s perspective. Defining these questionnaires as outcomes indicates that they are psychometrically sensitive to change. This article describes three PROMS: namely the Patient Reported Outcome Measurement Information System (PROMIS), the Quality of Life in Neurological Disorders (Neuro-QoL) and the Traumatic Brain Injury – Quality of Life (TBI-QOL) with the view to provide information about obtaining, administering, scoring, and interpreting these for individual clients with cognitive or language disorders. The authors report that these three measures are valid tools for chronic and neurological conditions, and TBIs respectively, despite the Neuro-QoL not including people with stroke-related aphasia. The authors propose that, when used clinically, the assessor may wish to make modifications to the presentation and use total communication strategies to enable the client to access the tools. The authors report that client scores can be compared to a normative sample, as well as behavioural assessment and proxy ratings. PROMS ratings can also inform a client’s candidacy for change, by using the PROMS tools to rate what they feel would be the most meaningful minimal difference for them following therapy. In this way the authors translate the measures, developed for research, to clinically relevant tools. This is particularly relevant in the UK when we are asked about the impact we have made. Having this type of data can influence commissioning and preserve services.

Clinical Use of PROMIS, Neuro-QoL, TBI-QoL, and Other Patient-Reported Outcome Measures for Individual Adult Clients with Cognitive and Language Disorders.
Cohen ML, Lanzi AM, Boulton, AJ.
SEMIN SPEECH LANG
2021;42(3):192-210.