In recent years, the healthcare industry’s understanding of value has evolved. Value-based care is no longer just about cutting costs or checking compliance boxes. It’s about improving outcomes, and increasingly, that means measuring success through the patient’s voice.
During PatientIQ’s recent Becker’s Healthcare webinar, clinical and quality leaders from across the country discussed how patient-reported outcomes (PROs) have become the new standard for defining value in healthcare. was once a niche research metric has grown into a key performance indicator that informs quality, reimbursement, and patient experience.
For years, PROs were viewed as “nice to have.” Health systems collected them sporadically through manual surveys or research projects. That changed when the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) introduced the THA/TKA PRO-PM program, tying reimbursement for hip and knee replacements to outcomes data.
As Deneen Ochab, Director of Quality and Patient Safety at Northwestern Medicine, explained during the webinar:
“When CMS rolled out the PRO-PM program, it created a real sense of urgency for us. It [the regulation] pushed us to think differently about how we were collecting data.”
That push reframed how Northwestern Medicine and other systems approach measurement. What began as a compliance effort quickly evolved into an enterprise-wide initiative to build sustainable workflows, automation, and clinician engagement. The CMS PRO-PM reporting requirements continue to accelerate this shift, reshaping how health systems define value and what patients expect from their care.
At Emplify Health, Joe Kucksdorf, Team Leader of Clinical Quality and Professional Development, described how the team’s early focus on sending and completing surveys evolved once clinicians began reviewing and applying the results.
“I think when physicians start to realize the value this has, and can instill that value in patients, now all of a sudden you're going to see it be driven from the bottom up, and more engagement and more expectation that it is being collected, and that'll make things change."
That shift, he explained, helped clinicians take ownership of outcomes and use PRO data to guide meaningful conversations about care.
At Northwestern Medicine, Ochab shared a similar experience. The system is projecting a near 90 percent completion rate by embedding PRO collection into routine patient engagement and showing clinicians how the data improves transparency and care planning. Together, these examples show that sustained success comes from shared ownership, where outcomes data becomes part of the culture rather than just a compliance strategy.
As the healthcare landscape continues shifting toward outcomes-based reimbursement, PROs are becoming the bridge between patient experience and clinical improvement
Dr. Steven Glassman, Medical Director at Norton Leatherman Spine, explained how real-time access to patient-reported outcomes is changing clinical decision-making and strengthening the link between data and care.
“We have an interface, a window in our EMR that gives us real-time PROs,” said Glassman. “We’re not looking at it in an article a year or two later. We’re looking at the relationship between the patient-reported outcomes and what the patient is telling us at that visit.”
This ability to view outcomes data during the patient encounter, he noted, is what turns information into action. It helps clinicians validate interventions, tailor treatment plans, and measure whether care is truly improving lives.
The case for PROs has never been clearer. What began as a regulatory requirement is becoming a strategic imperative that helps organizations deliver better care, improve financial performance, and measure what matters most to patients.
For a deeper look at how top systems are driving this change, watch the full on-demand webinar, From data to decisions: How leading health systems are finding new value in patient-reported outcomes.