Advanced Data Solutions : Azure Health Bot expands its template catalog to amplify the patient voice through PRO collection

In recent years, there has been an increasing focus to place patients at the center of healthcare decisions, improve safety, enhance experience and maximize the value of the provided care. Self-reporting of daily functioning and health outcomes from the patient, rather than caregiver perspectives, are widely used to inform and guide patient- and quality-centered care, clinical decision-making, research, and health policies. These measures have been shown to facilitate patient-provider communication and enhance treatment adherence. Moreover, if developed using standardized procedures, they can be used as clinical trial endpoints. Such usage is broadly encouraged by regulatory agencies and is informative for “downstream” decision-makers in the pathway to market, like insurers and health care systems. However, traditional Patient Reported Outcomes (PRO) collection instruments, such as paper-pencil surveys and phone interviews, make the process lengthy, cumbersome, and labor-intensive.

Azure Health Bot offers a natural approach to enable real-time electronic data collection directly from patients, that would be engaging, would amplify patient voice and accelerate outcomes. As we recently shared in this blog, during the last year of the pandemic, Azure Health Bot has been at the leading edge of helping organizations engage with patients at scale. During that time, the service delivered more than 2 billion messages to over 150 million people worldwide, spanning 25 countries.

Today we announce the Patient Reported Outcomes category that is added to the Azure Health Bot Template Catalog, to facilitate self-reporting of patient daily functioning and health outcomes metrics. The templates are built to support interoperability through FHIR questionnaires. This will allow healthcare organizations, such as care providers and clinical trial sponsors, to instantly put together Health Bot scenarios for collecting responses directly from patients, incorporating outcomes into data flows and aggregating them towards further analysis in the context of clinical trials, informed quality-centered care and beyond.

Starting with two widely known, generic health-related quality of life questionnaires, RAND 36-Item Health Survey (SF-36) and CDC HRQOL–14 "Healthy Days Measure", as well as already available PHQ-SADS mental health screener, we plan on expanding those later on to additional generic and condition-specific instruments. Both RAND SF-36 and HRQOL-14 templates, currently available in English, are fully localized and ready for translation.