Page 33 - THE DUTCH TALKING TOUCH SCREEN QUESTIONNAIRE

INTRODUCTION
Researchers and policy makers believe that routine Patient-Reported Outcome Measurements (PROMs) have the potential to play a significant role in advancing the quality and patient-centeredness of health care [1,2]. A Patient-Reported Outcome (PRO) is defined as any report of the status of a patient’s health condition, behavior or experience with health care that comes directly from the patient without interpretation of the patient’s response by a clinician or anyone else [3]. Driven by positive research outcomes, policy makers have spent well over two decades increasingly stimulating allied health professionals, not in the least physical therapists, to implement PROMs into their daily practice [4,5]. Physical therapists use PROMs to guide diagnostic and treatment decisions, treatment planning and/or treatment evaluation. It helps to evaluate the burden of disease and treatment from the patients’ perspective [6], stimulates discussion of patient outcomes during consultations, increases patient satisfaction about patient-provider-interaction and clinically significantly reduces prevalence and severity of symptoms [7]. Researchers and policy makers use PROMs at an aggregate level for comparative effectiveness research [8], assessment of the performance of clinicians and organizations, public reporting and value based payments [9]. They stimulate routine application of PROMs by clinicians, believing aligning clinical practice and performance measurement will maximize the impact of PROMs on the quality of health care [2].
Implementation of integrated use and routine application of PROMs into physical therapy practice has proven to be a complex and challenging process [2]. Physical therapists are more skeptical about using PROMs in the clinical setting than researchers and policy makers are and they experience significant barriers in routine application [5, 10,11]. Experts from the United States, England and The Netherlands state that having patients advocate the integrated use of PROMs would be an important facilitator. They add that for patients to become advocates, they must recognize this way of data collection as useful to their health and health care [2]. This approach is questionable, for little is known about the way patients perceive the usefulness of PROMs. Results from studies conducted in the mental health sector indicate that perceived usefulness from the patient perspective varies from partly positive [12] to completely negative [13].
Perceived ease of use and usefulness
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