Electronic Forms for Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) are an Effective, Time-Efficient, and Cost-Minimizing Alternative to Paper Forms
Abstract BACKGROUND: Patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) provide valuable information to the healthcare team regarding their patient’s health status. Identified dilemmas of PROMs completed on paper include missing answers, incorrectly scored answers, and missing questionnaires. Collecting PROMS on an electronic platform can potentially avoid these challenges. The objectives of this project were to a) determine the equivalence of the paper and electronic forms (e-form) of Childhood Health Assessment Questionnaire (CHAQ) and Quality of My Life (QoML) questionnaires; b) identify potential benefits and barriers associated with using an e-form to capture patient reported outcome measures (PROMs); and c) gather feedback on user experience. METHODS: Participants completed both a paper and an e-form of the questionnaires in a randomized order, following which they completed a feedback survey. Agreement of the scores between the forms were statistically analyzed using the intraclass correlation coefficient (95% CI) and bias was assessed using a Bland-Altman plot. Completion and processing times of the forms were compared using mean and median measures. Quantitative analysis was performed to assess user experience ratings, while comments were qualitatively analyzed to identify important themes.RESULTS: 196 patients participated in this project. Scores on the forms had high intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) agreement >0.9. New patients took longer than returning patients to complete the forms. Overall, the e-form was completed and processed in a shorter amount of time than the paper form. 83% of survey respondents indicated that they either preferred the e-form or had no preference. Approximately 10% of respondents suggested improvements to improve the user interface.CONCLUSIONS: E-forms collect comparable information in an efficient manner to paper forms. Given that patients and caregivers indicated they preferred completing PROMs in this manner, we will implement their suggested changes and incorporate e-forms as standard practice for PROMs collection in our pediatric rheumatology clinic.