Benefits of Electronically Capturing Patient-Reported Outcomes in Dermatology for Patient Care
abstract
This abstract is available on the publisher's site.
Access this abstract nowAn 18-year-old woman presented for a total body skin examination (TBSE) with a few benign-looking naevi on her abdomen. Her Skindex-16 Emotional subscore was the highest of any patient that day, indicating that she was very bothered by her skin condition. Upon further questioning, she expressed significant concern that these abdominal moles were melanoma, as her grandfather had recently died of melanoma.
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Benefits of Electronically Capturing Patient-Reported Outcomes in Dermatology for Patient Care
Br J Dermatol 2019 Apr 24;[EPub Ahead of Print], AM Secrest, MM Chren, ZH Hopkins, SC Chen, LK Ferris, R HessFrom MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
In this article, the authors discuss using patient-reported outcomes (PROs) to facilitate addressing the patient’s primary concerns and understanding the impact the disease has on their quality of life (QoL). They suggest utilizing the dermatology-specific PRO called the Skindex-16, which has a 0 to 100 scale, with 100 representing the maximal impact on QoL. Patients would complete this electronically on an iPad in the waiting room prior to a visit and these data would help to guide treatment decisions and patient counseling. For many patients, especially those who are hesitant to bring up their real concerns, this process would be wonderful. We can quickly learn how their disease is impacting their emotional and functional well-being and guide treatment decisions based on this.
However, this type of scoring also has the potential to backfire; therefore, we need to do larger studies before adopting this widely. When they compare their Skindex-16s between visits, patients could easily become frustrated if therapies aren’t escalated quickly. For example, the patient who is using topical steroids for small plaques of psoriasis on his knees returns with a Skindex-16 that is still high because he doesn’t feel comfortable wearing shorts. He angrily points out that we aren’t paying attention to his high Skindex-16 score and he wants a biologic. Do we start a systemic medication here? In the era of patient satisfaction measures, let’s just be careful that this is not yet another metric we constantly have to be worried about improving.