Geeky News Sheds Light on the Transformative Impact of ePROs in Outpatient Care

Surrey, United Kingdom Dec 18, 2023 (Issuewire.com) - Geeky News, a renowned British technology and lifestyle journal, is pleased to announce the publication of its latest article. The article is titled "Augmenting Outpatient Care: The CPROR Review Highlights the Transformative Impact of ePROs." This comprehensive review examines the benefits of implementing electronic patient-reported outcomes (ePRO) systems in clinical care, showcasing their potential to revolutionise outpatient services.

The research was conducted by the Centre for Patient-Reported Outcomes Research (CPROR) at the University of Birmingham. It was recently published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. The review findings emphasise the significant advantages of digital health technologies (DHTs), particularly PRO-based remote symptom monitoring tools, in clinical studies. Notably, the implementation of ePRO systems facilitates augmented clinical practice and a substantial reduction in outpatient waiting lists.

The overwhelming global demand for healthcare has pushed capacity to its limits. The COVID-19 pandemic has further strained the healthcare sector. That's resulted in prolonged patient waits and increased backlogs. 

Healthcare providers and trial sponsors must adopt advanced ePROs like ObvioHealth to overcome these challenges. With ePRO, participants can conveniently fill out questionnaires from the comfort of their homes, enhancing patient recruitment and retention rates by providing proactive patient experiences.

Moreover, ePRO enables clinicians to access near real-time health outcomes reported by participants, leading to expedited and streamlined remote data collection and patient monitoring. These capabilities empower healthcare providers to better manage the burgeoning healthcare demand. Ultimately, it results in more effective and improved patient care.

The CPROR review encompasses studies involving various patient groups. That allows for a comprehensive examination of the potential impact and effectiveness of remote symptom reporting systems across different clinical specialities. Notably, the review highlights the efficacy of ePRO in clinical conditions such as HIV, cancer, epilepsy, sleep apnoea, rheumatoid arthritis (RA), and type 1 diabetes.

Implementing ePRO for outpatient care offers numerous benefits, as reported in the study. Efficient triaging of patients and assessment of their clinical needs enable healthcare providers to deliver tailored patient management. For instance, stable patients can receive essential remote symptom support. Meanwhile, those with critical symptoms can be efficiently identified and prioritised.

Furthermore, the remote approach facilitates the timely delivery of interventions based on demand, enabling patients to access emergency healthcare more swiftly. In addition to streamlining and tailoring healthcare, ePRO optimises resource allocation, resulting in a more efficient and effective outpatient system that benefits participants and caregivers alike, as highlighted in the report.

The review cites the results of studies conducted on various clinical specialities to support these findings. For example, an observational implementation study involving AmbuFlex, a generic ePRO system, was conducted across multiple centres. The study focused on over 40,000 outpatients with chronic conditions. These conditions included RA, epilepsy, asthma, narcolepsy, coronary heart disease, sleep apnoea, renal failure, prostate cancer, and colorectal cancer.

According to the CPROR review, AmbuFlex significantly reduced the need for outpatient appointments. Notably, the system led to a reduction of up to 57% in in-person consultations for patients with sleep apnoea and up to 48% for epilepsy outpatients.

Dr. Lee Aiyegbusi, Associate Professor and Deputy Director at CPROR and lead author of the review, stated, "The use of PROs is well established in research settings to evaluate the effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, and tolerability of interventions from a patient perspective. Clinicians are now interested in using patient-level symptom reporting for the clinical management of individual patients in routine practice."

Dr. Aiyegbusi further added, "ePROs for outpatient care could facilitate the tailoring of care to patient needs. Stable patients can be monitored remotely using ePROs, thereby avoiding unnecessary check-ups in outpatient clinics and associated costs, such as travel and time off work, without lowering the quality of treatment.

"This efficient use of scarce healthcare resources could free up outpatient clinics for patients with high symptom burden or concerning symptoms, so they can be seen more quickly."

To read the full article, please visit Geeky News at https://www.geekynews.co.uk/epro-augmenting-outpatient-care/.