New App Designed to Help Patients Report Health Outcomes Wins Top Prize from AHRQ

Rockville, Md., March 05, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) today announced that an app called PRISM won the AHRQ Step Up App Challenge, a multi-phase competition to address the need for greater use of standardized patient-reported outcomes (PRO) data in clinical care and research.    

The goal of the Step Up App Challenge was to develop a user-friendly app capable of collecting standardized PRO data in various ambulatory settings, including primary and specialty care. This effort is part of AHRQ’s support for HHS Secretary Alex Azar’s priority on increasing value in healthcare by empowering patients with data and information to help them take an active role in making decisions about their care.

PRO data include any information on the status of a patient’s health condition that comes directly from the patient, without interpretation of the patient’s response by a clinician or other medical expert. These data can yield insights into health status, function, symptom burden, adherence, health behaviors, and quality of life.

The award-winning PRISM app was developed by a multidisciplinary team comprising experts from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management and the Institute for Health Informatics, Fairview Health System/HealthEast Kidney Stone Institute and PerkHealth, a Minnesota-based startup mobile app development company. PRISM is an acronym for PROMIS Reporting Insight System from Minnesota. PROMIS is a set of person-centered measures that evaluates and monitors physical, mental and social health in adults and children.

“This app is an innovative tool that will advance value and person-centered care by ensuring that information generated by patients is a major driver in their care,” said AHRQ Director Gopal Khanna, MBA. “PRISM will help overcome challenges in collecting and integrating standardized PRO data into health information technology systems.”

PRO data are not routinely collected and used in practice. One reason is that standards have not previously existed for collecting and integrating PRO data into health IT systems, thereby limiting the ability for clinicians to use the data or easily share these data across health systems for research or other purposes, including quality improvement.

PRISM guides patients through questions about their health status. It is possible for the responses to be integrated with the patient’s medical record so that a clinician can address the patient’s needs and concerns during the clinical visit.  In addition, the app fosters patient engagement by giving patients real-time feedback on how their data compare to the overall population, as well as personalized recommendations on improving their health.

PRISM will now be pilot tested in nine practice settings affiliated with MedStar Health in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia.  The results will be available later this year. Further information about PRISM can be found at https://z.umn.edu/prism and https://www.ahrq.gov/stepupappchallenge.

"Validated patient-reported outcome instruments, like the PROMIS measures, capture the subjective patient experience. Yet adoption gaps remain as they can be unnecessarily arduous to implement, collect and analyze data,” said Andrew Portis, M.D., Fairview Health System/HealthEast Kidney Stone Institute. “Building on the success that Fairview Health System/HealthEast Kidney Stone Institute has had utilizing paper-based PROMIS measures to predict and improve successful kidney stone passage, we built the PRISM app, an easy-to-use, secure, rewarding, and interoperable way to ‘reflect the voice of the patient.’"

The AHRQ Step Up App Challenge is part of AHRQ’s ongoing effort to help shape the Nation’s digital health care ecosystem and realize its potential to improve outcomes through broader use of patient data. In partnership with AHRQ, the Office of the Secretary is providing financial support from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Trust Fund, and the HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology is leading stakeholder efforts to develop the technical specifications that support the integration and interoperable exchange of structured PRO data.

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Lorin Smith
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
301-427-1864
newsroom@ahrq.hhs.gov