Use of Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) measures to characterise health status for patients seeking care from an orthopaedic provider: a retrospective cohort study

Objectives Characterise the health status of patients newly consulting an orthopaedic specialist across eight clinical subspecialties.Design Retrospective cohort.Setting 18 orthopaedic clinics, including 8 subspecialties (14 ambulatory and 4 hospital based) within an academic health system.Participants 14 910 patients consulting an orthopaedic specialist for a new patient consultation who completed baseline Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) measures associated with their appointment from 17 November 2017 to 13 May 2019. Patients were aged 55.72±5.8 years old, and 61.3% were female and 79.3% were Caucasian and 13.4% were black or African American. Patients who did not complete PROMIS measures or cancelled their appointment were excluded from the study.Primary outcome PROMIS domains of physical function, pain interference, pain intensity, depression, anxiety, fatigue, sleep disturbance and the ability to participate in social roles.Results Mean PROMIS scores for physical function were (38.1±9.2), pain interference (58.9±8.1), pain intensity (4.6±2.5), depression (47.9±8.9), anxiety (49.9±9.5), fatigue (50.5±10.3), sleep disturbance (51.1±9.8) and ability to participate in social roles (49.1±10.3) for the entire cohort. Across the clinical subspecialties, neurosurgery, spine and trauma patients were most profoundly affected across almost all domains and patients consulting with a hand specialist reported the least limitations or symptoms across domains. There was a moderate, negative correlation between pain interference and physical functioning (r=−0.59) and low correlations between pain interference with anxiety (r=0.36), depression (r=0.39) as well as physical function and anxiety (r=−0.32) and depression(r=−0.30) and sleep (r=−0.31).Conclusions We directly compared clinically meaningful PROMIS domains across eight orthopaedic subspecialties, which would not have been possible with legacy measures alone. These results support PROMIS’s utility as a common metric to assess and compare patient health status across multiple orthopaedic subspecialties.