Patient-Reported Outcome Measures: State of the Art in Patient-Reported Outcome Measure Application in Lower Extremity Orthopaedics

With an increasing shift toward a value-based and outcome-driven healthcare system, patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) will continue to play a prominent role in assessing performance, making clinical decisions, shared decision making, and determining the comparative effectiveness of procedures such as total joint arthroplasty for lower extremity conditions, such as ankle, hip, and knee osteoarthritis. As the application of PROMs in evaluating surgical outcomes has evolved from that of a research setting to that of a clinical setting, their use in the decision-making process has become more prevalent. As a result, preoperative optimization, surgical indications, and improved outcomes after surgery have been greatly enhanced. To enable benchmarking, quality reporting, and performance measurement at an aggregate level, it is crucial to have a comprehensive PROM collection system. However, achieving this goal is contingent upon addressing the variability in reported PROMs and the patient-centered benchmarks used to analyze clinical significance.