Person-specific outcome measure (PSO) for use in primary and community care

Abstract

© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2021. Reuse permitted under CC BYNC. No commercial reuse. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ. BACKGROUND Patientreported outcome and experience measures (PROMs and PREMs) fall into three broad categories: conditionspecific measures, which are applicable to patients with specific conditions only; generic measures, which apply to all types of patient; and individualised or personspecific measures (iPROMs), which let people identify issues that are most important to them. 2 Thousands of conditionspecific measures have been developed mainly for use in clinical trials; standardised generic measures are widely used in evaluation, for quality improvement and for allocating resources between different groups. However, fewer individualised measures have been developed, although there is increasing awareness of their value in tailoring personalised care in domains such as social prescribing. Individualised measures need to be used alongside generic or conditionspecific measures because every patient has their own set of priorities and some are much easier to resolve than others. Several individualised measures were developed during the 1990s, such as SEIQOL (Schedule for Evaluation of Individual Quality Of Life), PGI (Patient Generated Index) and MYMOP (Measure Yourself Medical Outcome Profile). MYMOP evolved into MYCaW (Measure Yourself Concerns and Wellbeing), which is a little simpler, with two concerns plus wellbeing. 7 At the request of customers working in social prescribing projects, at ROutcomes we used MYMOP and then MYCaW alongside our other measures. This identified a number of issues, which led to the development of a new iPROM, the personspecific outcome (PSO) measure, which is described here.