About
Measurely is a digital platform enabling consistent PROMs usage in healthcare. Proposed features include:
(1) Automated PROMs administration
(2) Immediate detection and follow-up of missing assessments and red flags
(3) Symptom tracking using empirically-supported reliable change criteria, severity bands and patient feedback
(4) Interactive reporting of patient progress to third parties and patients(5) Actionable feedback for clinicians and organisations regarding clinical performance, monitored over time
Rationale
Research indicates that many healthcare professionals feel overwhelmed by clinical administration, concerned about risk detection, and anxious about being unable to attract new referrals or prevent premature patient dropout (Grant et al., 2019). Although the routine use and reporting of PROMs can mitigate these issues, there are barriers to uptake among providers, including the time and difficulty required for administration and scoring, disagreement over instrument selection, lack of user-friendly methods for sharing results with referrers, and concerns about being negatively evaluated by colleagues (see Antunes et al., 2014 for a systematic review). As a consequence, providers often employ outcome measures haphazardly and without scientific rigour, or else avoid their usage altogether (Boyce, Browne & Greenhalgh, 2019). Inconsistent or absent outcome monitoring can result in a state of affairs where:
(1) Patients receive little or no objective feedback regarding their clinical progress
(2) Providers fail to accurately diagnose, monitor patient symptoms or utilise appropriate interventions
(3) Referrers receive insufficient reporting from allied health services upon which to base their own treatment and referral decisions
(4) Funding and governance bodies, lack the information required from providers to determine an appropriate degree and duration of support provision for consumers
(5) Providers experience low treatment satisfaction and confidence, given a lack of quantitative feedback on the effectiveness of their clinical interventions
Systematic reviews have identified a range of barriers and enablers to routine PROMs use in healthcare settings, including services that treat victims of transport accidents (Wolff et al., 2021). However significantly fewer scholarly attempts have been made to synthesise this knowledge into a digital product with the capacity for widespread uptake. This may be due to a combination of several factors, including the technical difficulty of implementing such a solution, a lack of knowledge regarding best practices in symptom tracking (e.g. reliable change algorithms), and a proclivity for practice management software to prioritise functionality supporting administrative efficiency over an understanding of clinical outcomes. Consequently, there is a need to co-design a PROMs platform that serves the interests of providers—one that integrates both research findings and state-of-the-art technological innovation.
Team
Timothy Deitz is a Clinical Psychologist and the founder of Effective Psychology, a private clinic located in Mount Eliza, Victoria. He has an extensive background in health psychology, having practiced in settings that include Epworth Rehabilitation, Royal Children’s Hospital, and St Vincent’s Hospital. Timothy completed his Masters thesis at University of Melbourne on the topic of persistent pain with a sample of patients from Royal Melbourne Hospital, and is an expert in quantitative data curation and analysis (in particular, the R programming language). He was the principal data analyst for a large-scale research collaboration between Western Health and University of Melbourne between 2020 and 2021. This research, which involved over 70 general practices across Victoria, evaluated Future Health Today (FHT), a digital health intervention that uses data from health records to automate the detection of chronic disease in primary care.
The Measurely platform is a collaboration between Timothy Deitz and Memorres Pty Ltd. The technology and delivery team consists of 9 members with a combined experience of over 30 years in the healthcare, medical, wellness, and education sectors. Memorres possesses functional, business and technical expertise in designing and developing practice management software, IOT apps, SASS solutions, CRM portals and custom integrations, using the latest technology architectures. Adhering to an agile methodology, the team follows best practices in software development, ensuring accessibility, scalability and maintainability, whilst prioritising stringent security protocols. The team is well-versed in designing solutions that meet various data safety handling protocols and compliances, including GDPR, PCR and HIPAA.
