Uses of PROMs

There are several potential uses for PROMs data, including:

Assessing the relative clinical quality of providers of elective procedures; for clinicians, managers and commissioners benchmarking their own performance, for regulators, for clinical audit and for patients and GPs exercising choice.

Researching what works: effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of different technical approaches to care can be evaluated using PROMs in association with other measures that assess what would have happened to patients in the absence of treatment or with alternative treatment.

Assessing the relative health status before operations: PROMs data will provide a measure of patients’ self-reported health status before they undergo operations. Exploring variations in these data along with other indicators for surgery, such as the patients’ social situations, other medical conditions and risk of deterioration and / or complication, could establish benchmarks.

Supporting the reduction of health inequalities.

There is a choice when analysing PROMs data of whether to examine all PROMs records or just those that have linked to HES. The advantage of examining all PROMs records is that records are not removed, so the dataset is larger with increased coverage. The advantage of examining only those records that link to HES is that the linked dataset offers a richer set of information, including the possibility to analyse the data by fields such as ethnicity, detailed procedure and diagnosis information, and other outcome data.

Therefore, for analysis of PROMs that does not require any of the additional information that HES offers, it is recommended that all PROMs records are used; while for analysis that does require additional linked information from HES only the linked records can be used. The related PROMs publications follow this convention, and so use linked and unlinked PROMs data.

PROMs data will be refreshed monthly and will be made available in following ways

• publicly available aggregated data: a high-level summary of the PROMs data plus a selection of data tables will be made available for download from NHS England website bi-annually
• publicly available record level data: Anonymised record level data available with the aggregated tables
• provider level extracts. Identifiable data available to the individual provider involved in the patient’s care. Data are only available where the patient has consented to this
• extract service: customers can request bespoke cuts of data via the extract service. An administrative fee will be charged to produce the bespoke request based on time and complexity of the request