Official Press Release

Winner Best Emerging Company 2009 - Connaught and Leinster

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The timetable for the event including speakers is here

I attended the Inaugural event earlier this year and really learned alot from it.

The term Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMS) is the designated term in healthcare services to describe this approach. Guidelines on using PROMS, based on the results of of research and piloting of PROMs in the NHS have recently been published.

This PROMS conference was in conjunction with the Institute of Healthcare Management and featured some very interesting presentations on the application of PROMS in healthcare provision in the UK. The event was absolutely packed out (estimate 250 attendees), mostly NHS healthcare managers and senior medical consultants in attendance. The organisers had clearly underestimated the interest in this subject.

What has prompted the growing interest in this event is the new Standard NHS Contract for Acute Services, introduced in April 2008 by the UK DOH. This includes a requirement in Schedule 5 to report from April 2009 on patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) in a number of clincal specialities, hence the rush to understand PROMS and how to implement them by clinicians and healthcare managers.

Attendees heard from a range of speakers about the applications of PROMS in health.  Stefan Cano a researcher with the Institute of Neurology and psychometrician, gave an excellent presentation on the psychometrics of PROMS and had some very critical things to say about many of the current PROMS in practice. A psychologist by profession, he is clearly an individual with an indepth knowledge of the area backed up by excelllent research data and great presentation skills in what is quite a technical area. I expect to be posting further blogs about his work in the future.

Next up was Mark Emerton, clearly an expert in his specialist field of urology, his overview of the development of PROMS in this field was illuminated by his extensive clinical experience in the field. He trained as a psychologist prior to his training as a surgeon specialising in urology and his interest in the patients perspective on outcomes was been a consistent themes in his work

Further posts to follow including details on other presenters, in the meantine thanks to the Institute of Healthcare Managers and Healthcare Events for a great conference.

At the moment I’m too tired to write an entire post. However I was Tweeting at the event, for those of you not following me on Twitter here are the Tweets during the Keynote speakers (my iPhone battery ran out at noon)

For those of you unfamiliar with Twitter it is a Micro Blogging tool. Entries must be 140 characters or less and are generally called Tweets. You can follow people on Twitter and their updates and they in turn can follow your updates on Twitter.

The hash # tag can be added to Tweets to give contextual information to your entries, such as your location or a particular conference, event or topic. In this case I used the #HISI tag to signify Health Informatics Society of Ireland. People who cannot attend the event or who wish to find out what people are “Tweeting” on a particular location, conference or topic can search for Tweets containing that hash tag.

To see my updates on Twitter and join go here.

One of the main motivations of FIT (Feedback Informed Treatment) in our opinion is that very often the patient is an expert in their particular condition. This is especially true in the case of people suffering from long term chronic illness’.

So what was the main thing that I took from Health 2.0? Many of the tools such as Long tail search, social networks and other types of knowledge sharing all contribute to making the individual even more of an expert in their particular condition.

This is invaluable for two of the areas we are looking at:
1) Patient Self Management of their chronic illness
2) The Patient giving their evaluation of progress in treatment during the actual meeting/session with their healthcare professional

In fact I would go so far as to say that one cannot succeed without the other. There is no point in a patient becoming an expert in their condition if there is no means for them to have meaningful input into the direction of treatment based on their evaluation of progress. Conversely this makes the advocacy aspect and disseminating knowledge even more critical.

Such tools, generally self report questionnaires administered at every treatment session, have been around for at least a decade in the field of psychological therapies. Psychological therapies that features such measures have come to be know as the client directed outcome informed (CDOI). An orientation which has gained in prominence in recent years thanks to the pioneering work of Michael Lambert and his colleagues at the University of Utah and Scott Miller and Barry Duncan at the Institute for the Study of Therapeutic Change.

More recently in an online discussion on the CDOI listserv initiated by Eric Kuelker of Mental Health Pros the concept of feedback improved treatment (FIT) was debated. This concept essentially describes an approach to treatment, adaptable by any healthcare practitioner, in which feedback from the patient on progress in treatment is privileged and an appropriate response to such feedback is seen as an important factor that contributes to treatment compliance, retention and outcome.

Such orientations have gained significant ground in terms of practitoner acceptance in the field of psychological therapies. They are poised to play a key role in guiding treating planning and administration in the broader healthcare sector in the future.

I’ll be kept busy as  a volunteer at the event however I’ll be providing frequent updates on Twitter twitter.com/endamadden and following up with some blogs on my thoughts and highlights from the conference.