Best practices to successfully engage patients in pre-visit PRO reporting will reduce the need for PRO collection during the busy office visit. Front-end staff can be valuable contributors to the collection process since they are the first point of contact for patients. Educate team members on the use of PROs to assess symptom severity, physical and emotional function, social well- being, and quality of life.
To prepare staff to answer patient questions, an office flyer you can customize and display in a prominent location is included in our PRO Implementation workbook.

Key tips to incorporate PRO collection into your pre-visit workflow are also included in our PRO Implementation Workbook.

PRO invitations that include a message from the clinician will motivate patients to complete the information. For example, a reminder text or email can convey that:

• Patients are the best source of symptom information and questions are designed to understand the impact on their daily lives.

• The PRO information will be reviewed and used during the visit to discuss care.

• Provide additional information about PROs to answer patient questions. A sample patient message that can be customized to your site is included in our PRO Implementation Workbook.

Information used during the visit becomes important to the patient. Establishing a workflow that reliably makes the PRO scores available to the clinician for use during the visit will motivate patients to continue to provide PRO feedback.

Tips for ensuring clinicians have the results is included in our PRO Implementation Workbook.

After-treatment collection of PROs is essential to tracking meaningful outcomes. Collecting these data is a challenge for many busy clinical practices because patients do not routinely return for post-treatment appointments or return according to the prescribed PRO schedule. Therefore, it is necessary to implement workflows for post-treatment PRO collection that is not dependent upon clinical visits. Fortunately, there are best practices that can be easily implemented with technological support that exists in most offices and EHRs. However, successful PRO collection requires a dedicated staff person to manage the non-visit PRO completion lists to remind patients when PROs are due.

Tips for successfully managing post-treatment collection are included in our PRO Implementation Workbook