Quality of Life Trajectories With Integration Into Electronic Health Records for High-Resolution Patient Outcomes:...

Area of Science:

• Digital Health
• Health Informatics
• Clinical Outcomes Research

Background:

• Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) like health-related quality of life (HRQoL) are crucial but often collected infrequently.
• Frequent electronic PROMs (ePROMs) face declining response rates.
• Integrating ePROMs into electronic health records (EHRs) may enhance response rates and personalize therapy.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess the technical and clinical feasibility of high-frequency HRQoL assessments within EHR systems for routine clinical care.

Main Methods:

• Patients received mobile device prompts with links to a web-based app (MyEDC) for HRQoL assessment.
• Data were transferred via a proxy to the hospital network and uploaded to EHRs.
• High-frequency HRQoL data were collected across psychosomatics, hematology, visceral surgery, and neurosurgery use cases.

Main Results:

• High-resolution QoL trajectories were obtained for 110 patients over 2 weeks to 3 months.
• Clinically relevant findings included significant HRQoL increases in psychosomatics, correlations with EORTC QLQ-C30 in hematology, and associations with pain in visceral surgery.
• Response times were rapid (median 0.9-7.1 hours), and HRQoL correlated with disease-specific symptoms, confirming clinical validity.

Conclusions:

• High-resolution QoL tracking via EHR integration is technically and clinically feasible.
• This method provides a novel readout beyond traditional endpoints.
• It enables precise disease characterization and facilitates comparative treatment analysis.