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This report aims to identify what measurement areas within the patient health journey are important to patients when determining if patient-centered clinical decision support (PC CDS) is achieving its intended purpose.
Developed by the AHRQ Clinical Decision Support Innovation Collaborative’s Measurement and Outcomes Workgroup, this report highlights what patient health journey measurement areas should be prioritized.
Patient-centered clinical decision support (PC CDS) helps provide timely information that can inform healthcare decision making for clinicians, patients, and other healthcare advocates and care teams. Measuring outcomes is key to determining if PC CDS is achieving its intended purpose. This report summarizes preliminary work to identify what measurement areas within the patient health journey are essential to patients when assessing PC CDS, and why.
About the Report
PC CDS measurement should assess if and how PC CDS influences outcomes important to patients, which requires the identification of what process and outcome measures patients find important. This report builds on previously identified patient health journey measures relevant to PC CDS by assessing which measurement areas are most important to patients.
Patients prioritized 15 patient health journey measurement areas related to patients’ lived experiences across three domains: patient decision making, patient engagement, and patient care experience.
In the final round of prioritization, the top three measurement areas included:
- Communication quality
- Trust in clinician
- Access to information
In addition to the above results of the prioritization activity, three additional themes related to measurement were raised by patients in a virtual discussion panel:
- The role of context
- The connection between measurement areas
- The importance of measuring other areas that impact the patient health journey, including social determinants of health (SDOH) and other social needs
How To Use The Report
This report can be used by PC CDS researchers and implementers as well as healthcare organizations to inform what patient-centered measurement areas should be included in PC CDS assessments. The findings further highlight several important areas for future work. Specifically, future work should focus on identifying appropriate instruments for the prioritized patient health journey measurement areas. Additionally, there are potentially evolving measurement needs related to access to information, and further investigation is needed to identify the context-specific importance of measurement areas.
Suggested Citation: Kurtzman RT, Desai PJ, Ozkaynak M, Kukhareva P, Jiménez F, Nwefo R, Dullabh PM, and CDSiC Measurement and Outcomes Workgroup. Prioritizing Patient-Centered Measurement Areas for PC CDS. Prepared under Contract No. 75Q80120D00018. AHRQ Publication No. 24-0069-2. Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; July 2024.
