In healthcare there is a goal to provide patient-centered care as a hallmark of achieving effective, quality health care. What this means is that care focuses on the needs and perspectives of patients. As such, healthcare providers are faced with the challenge to focus on what matters to patients during their encounters with the health system. One problem that needs solving is how to assist healthcare providers to use assessment tools that are “patient-centered” (also referred to as patient-centered measurement (PCM)). Once these tools are used, the second problem that needs solving is how healthcare providers can routinely integrate this information to inform patients’ care. Specifically, information gained from these tools at the practitioner level can be used for various purposes, such as screening, monitoring, planning and evaluating care, and creating decision aids.
To address these problems, we will study how providers can interpret and integrate data from patient-centered measurement assessments (experience and outcome tools) into routine clinical care. To answer this question we will use a multi-method approach to involve researchers, knowledge users (stakeholders that are healthcare providers and decision makers supporting practice), and patient partners. The outcome of this study is the development of guidelines for providers and decision makers on the routine use of PCM data for planning and decision making at the point-of-care at the provider-patient interface. Overall, the proposed study investigates the use of PCM information by providers at the point-of-care and identifies influences to use these data on a routine basis for patient care in various practice areas across care transitions/illness trajectories (i.e., rehabilitation, mental health, perinatal/child health, and oncology). This integrated knowledge translation project consists of 26 academic and practice partners along with 5 patient partners. Funding was received from the BC SUPPORT Unit, patient-centered measurement cluster.