What creates, maintains or increases patient engagement with PROMs?

Abstract

The healthcare industry is now shifting to become more patient-centric. Traditional methods focus on disease management, but the new shift is now making patients the centre of the healthcare ecosystem. Understanding their needs has become an important aspect. The implementation of a new health informatics called Patient Recorded Outcome Measures (PROMs) is the missing link. Healthcare professionals are increasingly noticing the value PROMs brings to the current patient-provider interaction. Although there are many benefits for the use of PROMs to improve quality care, there is a lack of evidence showing how to promote PROMs. Understating how to influence adoption has been a challenge within healthcare. Therefore, a strategy and framework needs to be created to aid patient’s adoption of PROMs. As a result, this research has utilised ‘prospect theory’ (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979) as a theoretical framework, supported by Tversky & Kahneman’s (1981) theory on framing effects, whereby gain and loss frames are used to motivate individual behaviour based on positive (gain) or negative (loss) messages. Thus, a research question was developed to explore this area: What creates, maintains, or increases patient engagement with the use of PROMs from the patient’s perspective? The research question was explored through a review of the literature on Health Informatics and framing effects. To answer the research question causal research was conducted. Following a detailed analysis of the raw data, several key findings were identified. The loss framed message was proven significant in influencing individual’s attention to adopt PROMs, however, was very much dependent on individual’s sensitivity to risk. High risk sensitive individuals whom were presented the loss framed message were most likely to adopt PROMs. This was attributed towards individual’s core beliefs, attitudes, personality, influence on behaviour and most importantly the value of the loss in decision making. Thus, promotion of PROMs has the most influence when the drawbacks are presented to individuals whom have a high sensitivity to risk.