Patient reported outcome and experience measures of oral disease in oral medicine

A recent meeting of health ministers from over 40 countries worldwide deemed that time and money should be spent on outcome and experience measures that would allow us to determine whether our health systems deliver outcomes that truly matter to patients. This meeting, along with recent national programmes to promote the use of outcome measures in evaluating medical and surgical interventions, highlighted the important role that patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) and patient reported experience measures (PREMs) have in healthcare. Oral medicine as a speciality has promoted the use of PROMs to some extent in the recent past with the use of generic and oral health specific measures in the literature and the delivery of plenary lectures at international scientific meetings. We could find no publications regarding the use of PREMs in oral medicine. This article highlights the commonly used PROM tools in the oral mucosal disease and salivary gland literature and makes recommendations for the evaluation of the development properties of currently used instruments and the establishment of core outcome sets in the commonly managed conditions in an oral medicine setting. It is also hoped that by looking at the types of PREM tools available we can determine a suitable instrument for the evaluation of patient experience in oral medicine practice.