Editorial Commentary: Legacy Patient-Reported Outcome Measures Remain Important Today Despite Responder Burden, but With Further Refinement, Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System Could Replace Legacy Instruments in the Future.

Abstract

Measuring patient-reported outcomes (PROs) is a key tenet in the drive toward value-based care. A more detailed understanding of outcomes has traditionally been obtained with increasingly frequent and more in-depth patient questionnaires. Legacy PROs require patients to complete a predetermined set of questions. Administering lengthy surveys repeatedly can generate respondent fatigue that compromises quality of the survey responses and overall compliance. In addition, these legacy scales have notable ceiling and floor effects, which limit their capacity to describe the condition of patients who are functioning at relatively high or low levels. Modern computer adaptive instruments, such as PROMIS, strive to minimize responder burden and mitigate floor and ceiling effects associated with many legacy instruments. However, although these new newer instruments correlate (moderately) with legacy scores, PROMIS also shows floor and ceiling effects, and PROMIS responsiveness is currently understudied. Today, we collect both PROMIS and legacy scores for tracking patient outcomes and for research purposes. We predict that with further refinement, PROMIS will replace legacy patient-reported outcome measures.