Key Takeaways
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PRO data can surface disparities that aren’t obvious in traditional clinical workflows.
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Embedding data capture into the electronic health record (EHR) streamlines research and reveals operational insights.
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Socioeconomic context can influence how patients report symptoms and engage with care.
What happens when a nationally renowned health system reimagines how it collects and uses patient-reported outcomes (PROs)?
An associate professor of orthopaedic surgery set out to answer that question by leading a short-term research initiative focused on socioeconomic and demographic factors in PRO completion and symptom reporting. With multiple practice locations and a diverse patient population, the team had both the opportunity and the complexity to dig deep—but lacked a scalable way to collect, manage, and analyze the data.
The Challenge of Comprehensive Data
Conducting this kind of research at scale is no small feat. Gathering and analyzing data on race, ethnicity, age, sex, and geography—alongside patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs)—requires more than manual chart review or standalone surveys. It demands a system-level approach that fits into the clinical workflow and ensures data integrity across settings.
That’s where PatientIQ came in.
Integrating Data at the Point of Care
By embedding PRO collection directly into the EHR, the health system was able to seamlessly gather high-quality data at the point of care. Over the course of a six-month pilot, the team uncovered critical themes across four main areas:
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Completion Trends: Where patients were most likely to engage with PROMs
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Demographic Insights: Which patient groups showed the highest compliance
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Symptom Disparities: How symptom severity varied across populations
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Workflow + Bias Mitigation: Where the findings revealed opportunities to improve equity and accuracy
These themes revealed not only opportunities to improve equity in care delivery but also highlighted the need for continuous refinement in how data is captured and interpreted.
Building a Foundation for the Future
Beyond the findings, the study demonstrated the value of tightly integrated PRO workflows. The health system left the pilot with actionable intelligence to support clinical care, inform future research, and reduce potential bias in outcome analysis.
For organizations looking to launch short-term studies or long-term outcomes research, platforms like PatientIQ’s ResearchPRO offer a flexible, EHR-integrated solution to accelerate discovery without disrupting care.
