Project on Patient Reported Outcomes (PRO) receives 1.7 million DKK of the Ministry of Health's PRO pool
As part of the Finance Act, money has been set aside for the Ministry of Health to support projects in the Danish regions where hospitals, in collaboration with municipalities and/or general practice, use PRO in direct patient treatment and in quality work.
Among the 12 applications, six projects have received support, including three in the Region of Southern Denmark.
PRO (Patient Reported Outcomes) is information about the patient's state of health, including physical and mental health, symptoms, health-related quality of life and functional level. PRO is reported directly by the patient. PRO is found in English-language literature and is referred to in some contexts as PROM (Patient Reported Outcome Measures).
The one project that has received support from the pool is called The PRO-active patient, and takes place in collaboration between CIMT, Cardiological Outpatient Clinic at OUH Svendborg Hospital and Svendborg Municipality's Health Centre, which offers an extended cardiac rehabilitation service to citizens. The project is aimed at patients in need of cardiac rehabilitation after hospitalisation with ischaemic heart disease, and aims to find patients with an extended need for help to follow recommendations on smoking cessation, weight loss, exercise and medication compliance, as well as screening for anxiety and depression, and testing PRO methods for these patients.
Today, PRO is primarily widespread within the hospital sector, but with the pool the ministry also wanted to involve municipalities and general practice.
For Marie-Louise Krogh, who heads the project at OUH, it will be particularly interesting to see if the benefits of PRO are the same in general practice as they are in the hospital system:
"It is exciting if the sectors have the same focus on where the patient is in the whole PRO concept. Part of the process in our project is to find out if the primary and secondary sectors want to use the same PRO scheme, and how the workflows between sectors differ from each other. There is no clear-cut solution. At the same time, the project is about whether we dare to leave responsibility to the patients. It is an exciting perspective. I am convinced that patients can do much more than we let them know do today," says Marie-Louise Krogh, Innovation Consultant at OUH.
The project starts in the spring of 2017. More information will be available on this page continuously.