Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. will lead a project with eight other universities to integrate patient-reported outcomes into electronic health records as part of a grant from the National Institutes of Health.
The universities were awarded a $6.3 million grant from the NIH's National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences to develop a software that will integrate a patient survey tool into EHRs in an effort to improve clinical care and research.
EHR developers Epic Systems Corp. and Cerner Corp. will be part of the project as integration collaborators.
The survey tool, called Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS), asks patients questions regarding their physical, mental and social health. Integrating the survey into an EHR would allow physicians to compare a patient's medical information to their unique responses.
PROMIS was developed with support from the NIH to help providers quantify outcomes like pain, fatigue and emotional distress for individual patients. Studies have shown the survey is an effective way to improve healthcare quality.
The tool is already used by Northwestern Medicine.
The grant was awarded to Northwestern University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Alabama at Birmingham, University of Kentucky, University of Florida, University of Utah, Harvard University's Catalyst, Clinical and Translational Science Center and Southern California Clinical Translational Science Institute.
