Application of Patient Reported Outcomes and Experiences

The application of patient-reported outcome and experience measures (PROMs and PREMs) is transforming the landscape of person-centered healthcare. Traditionally applied at the clinical or micro level, these measures are increasingly recognized as vital for informing broader organizational, regional, and national decisions that affect health system design, accountability, and improvement. This Research Topic is grounded in the view that PROMs and PREMs are measurement tools that have a role as endpoints for evaluating person-centred care, but are also core mechanisms for embedding person-centeredness in routine care and health system governance.Recent advances highlight ongoing challenges for the application of PROMs and PREMs in person-centred care: agreement about what to measure in the enactment of person-centred care vs the anticipated outcomes and experiences of person-centredness, integrating PROMs and PREMs at scale, ensuring measures factor individual health-related preferences, needs, goals and values in between-group and within-group comparisons, and balancing data quality with practicality for diverse populations and clinical settings. While classical test theory and item response theory have supported developing robust PROMs/PREMs, rapid digitalization and evolving care models require innovative solutions to challenges like measurement bias, missing data, and burden minimization, particularly for historically underserved groups. Significant studies have explored linking these measures with routine administrative and clinical datasets, yet gaps remain in equity-focused analyses, cross-context scalability, and translation into policy and system-level learning.This Research Topic aims to catalyze evidence, theoretical developments, and practical approaches that advance PROM and PREM measurement and application - ensuring that person perspectives drive health system learning and value-based improvement at every level. Key objectives include fostering methodological innovation (such as refined measurement, adaptive tests, and equity stratifiers), as well as demonstrating real-world application and integration: how PROMs and PREMs are used to guide improvement, payment models, benchmarking, and governance. We also seek to deepen understanding of contextual factors, stakeholder engagement, analytic methods, and ethical considerations that influence how patient-reported data are adopted for quality improvement, accountability, health equity, and person-centered health systems.Authors are encouraged to explicitly articulate how their work engages with concepts, theories, and frameworks of person-centered care. Submissions should clarify how PROM and PREM use, implementation, and evaluation reflect, enable, or challenge the application of person-centeredness in research, clinical practice and policy.This Research Topic welcomes submissions addressing the integration of PROMs and PREMs from local pilots to system-wide adoption, advancing scalable and actionable use. Studies may focus on instrument development, novel data sources, analytic innovations, or implementation, within boundaries of person-centered care delivery, measurement and health system improvement. We invite contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:o Integration of PROMs and PREMs across micro, meso, and macro levels o Inclusion as evaluation endpoints for assessing person-centered care in research and care practices.o Instrument development and refinement (cultural adaptation, methods for shorter versions, item banking, computerized adaptive testing)o Methodological rigor: validity, measurement invariance, bias mitigation, and minimally important difference estimation o Novel data sources and methods (EHRs, patient portals, wearables/sensors, free-text/NLP, pragmatic capture in routine care, marrying aggregate and individual person data)o Connections between PROMs/PREMs and national registers and other administrative/clinical datasets, including linkage methods, case-mix, and comparabilityo Longitudinal designs (trajectories, growth-curve/latent class models, minimally important change, handling missingness)o Embedding PROMs/PREMs within clinical pathways, registries, dashboards, and learning health systems; local applications and scale-up from pilots to routine practiceo Analytics including interpretable machine learning for risk adjustment, feature selection, adaptive sampling, and early-warning dashboards, with transparency and bias mitigationo Benchmarking, value-based payment, and system-level feedback mechanismso Governance, privacy, and ethical frameworks; equity stratifiers, intersectional analyses, stakeholder engagement, and translating measurement into improvement and accountability Topic editors: Øyvind Andresen Bjertnæs, Claudia Rutherford, Bora Kim Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/75271/application-of-patient-reported-outcomes-and-experiences