This is the dominant term for what I would prefer, in our realms, we called “Client reported change measures”! I think the “client” versus “patient” issue is obvious enough, about avoiding the reduction in autonomy implicit in too much of an “illness” (a.k.a. “medical” model). Perhaps less obviously, I regard “outcome” as a post-mortem judgement that we never actually get to make on others. However, I am broadly in favour of us measuring change as long as we don’t overvalue any numbers and handle them cautiously.
Details #
In a more general terminology these are a subset of “COAs”: Clinical Outcome Assessments complemented by other assessments (see next). In the UK NHS “PROMs” are now almost always nomothetic, multi-item, self-report questionnaires such as the CORE measures and the PHQ-9, GAD-7, WSAS etc. In principle I think that PROMs include user generated measures such as the PQ and PSYCHLOPS and purely idiographic measures such as elicited repertory grids, Rorschach and other “projective” “tests” (separate scare quotes around both words! In fact there is a slowly growing respect for the use of user generated measures but sadly no coherent psychometric framework around what to do if we want to compare numbers from such measures between clients. However, I think some would say that true PROMs are only measures in which everyone sees and answers exactly the same questions. That of course begs the issue, mentioned in the OMbook, that how different people will read and understand “I have felt terribly alone and isolated” may be very different for all that the words they are reading are the same. That’s another intriguing challenge in psychometrics.
Try also #
- Clinician-reported outcome (ClinRO) measures (ClinROMs, CROMs)
- Idiographic measures and methods
- Idiographic vs. nomothetic: history
- Interview measures
- Nomothetic measures and nomothetic data
- Observer-reported outcome (ObsRO) measures (ObsROMs, OROMs)
- Psychometrics
- Performance outcome (PerfO) measures (PerfOMs, POMS)
- PSYCHLOPS (PSYCHLogical Outcome ProfileS)
- Repertory grids
- Self-report measures
Chapters #
PROMs are really the focus of the entire OMbook. Issues noted above are covered particularly in Chapters 1 to 5.
Online resources #
Various apps in my Shiny apps provide particular tools that are useful for analysing PROM data and I hope to add apps there that analyse datasets of PROM data through 2025.
Dates #
First created 5.i.25.
