Charité PROM Rollout” project receives Lohfert Prize 2023
Berlin, 20.09.2023
When hospitals record the results of treatments, it is often a matter of facts and figures: How often is an operation performed? How often were there complications? As part of its strategy “We are rethinking health – Charité 2030”, the Berlin University Medical Centre wants to focus even more on the subjectively perceived well-being of patients when measuring the success of treatment. To this end, patients are already routinely asked at several clinics of the Charité how they themselves assess their state of health during and after treatment. Such questionnaires are called “Patient Reported Outcome Measures” (PROMs). The Charité has now received an award for the introduction of PROMs.
The medicine of the future: what does it look like? For Berlin University Medicine, this means taking the perspective of patients even more into account. A stronger focus on the benefits for patients is therefore part of the strategic concept “We are rethinking health – Charité 2030”, which the Charité Board of Directors presented at the end of 2020.
“Standardised recording of “How are you doing?
The project “Charité PROM Rollout” aims at the comprehensive recording of self-reported health in all patients of the Charité in routine care. With the award of the Lohfert Prize 2023, the Christoph Lohfert Foundation has now recognised the commitment of Berlin University Medicine in this area. According to the jury, the project impressively shows how the Charité, as a large company, values, systematically records and evaluates patients and their assessment of their illness. The award ceremony took place yesterday as part of the Hamburg Health Business Congress.
Prof. Dr. Martin E. Kreis, Chief Medical Officer of the Charité, supports and promotes the project. He says: “At the Charité, we are working towards ensuring that the subjective feelings of the patient are the focus of every treatment. In this way, we want to further improve both the quality of treatment and the quality of life of those affected. However, the systematic evaluation of the patients’ views in such a large institution is anything but trivial. I am all the more pleased that the efforts of all the staff involved in the project to implement PROMs at the Charité have now been recognised.”
The project, which has now received an award, is coordinated by an interdisciplinary team from the Charité Center for Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (CPCOR). Its director, PD Dr Felix Fischer, explains: “Our task is to record the question ‘How are you doing?’ in such a way that the answer becomes measurable and comparable in its many dimensions. On the one hand, this standardisation makes it easier for medical staff to talk to patients about the individual limitations of their quality of life and, if necessary, to address them therapeutically. On the other hand, through the anonymised comparison of many disease courses, we can record the effects of different therapies on the subjectively perceived state of health. This information is an important basis for the choice of therapy, which can then be made increasingly together with the person affected.”
PROMs in all Charité clinics in future
PROMs provide information about individually perceived health and quality of life. They complement the existing measuring instruments, which are based on quantitative parameters such as blood values, tumour growth, blood pressure or weight. At the Charité, cross-disease PROM questionnaires are in use that digitally capture eight core domains of health: physical functioning, pain, sleep, fatigue, anxiety, depressiveness, cognitive functioning and social participation. In order to be able to measure the quality of life in the course of treatment, the patients are asked about their state of health before, during and after therapy – with the help of a tablet at the Charité and by e-mail after discharge.
PROMs are already routinely collected at the Charité in the Breast Centre of the Clinic for Gynaecology, the facilities of the Spine Centre, the Centre for Musculoskeletal Surgery, the Clinic for Urology, the Clinic for Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery and the Medical Clinic with a focus on psychosomatics. The questionnaires are currently being introduced in other Charité facilities. The aim is to carry out a nationwide survey of PROMs at all clinics and outpatient clinics of the Charité, i.e. a systematic survey of more than 120,000 patients treated as full and partial inpatients and more than 730,000 patients treated as outpatients.
About the Lohfert Prize
The Christoph Lohfert Foundation has been awarding the Lohfert Prize, worth 20,000 euros, since 2012 with the aim of promoting innovative projects to improve patient safety and orientation. This year’s call for entries was “Rethinking Medicine – Sustainable Concepts for Sustainable Health Care”. Projects were sought that address dimensions of sustainability in health care.
Images:
PROMs are collected at the Charité using a digital questionnaire. Patients answer questions about symptoms, health restrictions and their quality of life via a tablet as early as the anamnesis stage © Bertram Solcher | Christoph Lohfert Stiftung
Presentation of the Lohfert Prize at the Hamburg Health Economics Congress. From left to right: Dr. Alizé Rogge, Fr. Andrea Figura, PD Dr. Felix Fischer, Claudia Hartmann, PD Dr. Maria Margarete Karsten, Dr. Christoph Paul Klapproth (all Charité), Carolina Lohfert Praetorius (Board Christoph Lohfert Foundation), Prof. Dr. Matthias Rose (Charité), Prof. Dr. Dr. Kai Zacharowski (Board Christoph Lohfert Foundation) © M. Rauhe | Christoph Lohfert Foundation