Patient-Reported Outcome Measures: How to 
Maximize Their Utility and Mitigate Health Care Disparities

Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) provide a standardized assessment from the patient about their own health status. Although originally developed as research tools, PROMs can be used in clinical orthopaedic care to complement objective functional measures (eg, range of motion). When PROMs are used during clinical care, they can improve patient outcomes, engagement, well-being, and patient-physician communication. Therefore, PROMs are increasingly integrated into shared decision-making approaches to guide treatment decisions, enhance treatment plans, and predict outcomes. They are also being used in quality measurement and value-based health care arrangements. However, methods to communicate PROMs with patients have not been fully developed, and there continue to be barriers to implementing their collection and communication at scale. In addition, measuring care quality and communicating PROMs with patients may have unintended consequences, such as when used in measurement without accounting for confounding factors (eg, psychological and social health), or in perpetuating health care disparities when used imprecisely (eg, lack of linguistic or cultural validation). It is important to describe the current state of PROM use in orthopaedic surgery, highlight opportunities and challenges of PROM use in clinical care, and provide a roadmap for how to incorporate PROMs to equitably improve patient health and build orthopaedic surgery practices.