Presentation description

Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) are a set of standardized tools that aim to qualitatively assess the experience of illness or disability from a patient’s perspective. These surveys differ from satisfaction surveys as instead of asking about the quality of healthcare received, they seek to assess the long-term outcomes of surgical patients. They’ve been used for decades in the elective surgical fields to assess patient recovery, post-surgical complications, and understand optimal intervention strategies in cases where traditional surgical outcome measures don’t provide enough information about the success of the operation: A hip-replacement patient may be healthy following surgery, but PROMs seek to understand if the operation improved the patients quality of life with the replacement beyond the stability of the patient post-operation. There is a significant lack of such data for EGS patients, suggesting a lack of understanding of the long-term and quality-of-life outcomes for these patients. This study aimed to increase the response rates to the PROMs v2.1 survey for general surgery patients in the clinical setting. The targeted patients were consult patients before their surgery and post-operative check in patients. Using a short interview, 30 patients were interviewed before their appointment to ascertain their preferences concerning taking surveys. Following this process, a review of the percentage of responses to the PROMs survey with a sample size of 122 patients. Patients overwhelmingly prefer to use the electronic medical record app Epic and email to receive and take surveys. Patients reported preferring not to use an iPad to take a RedCap survey prior to their appointment due to feeling pressure to complete the optional survey. Recommendations were made to offer a tablet with the survey to patients who had not completed the survey prior to their appointment. Furthermore, 48% of surveys assigned were completed before any recommendations were implemented, meeting the standard response rate of 30% for clinical surveys