The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) announced three Phase 2 winners in its Step Up App Challenge: Advancing Care Through Patient Assessments. AHRQ looked for teams to design, develo, and pilot a user-friendly application that simplifies the process of collecting, interpreting, aggregating and sharing patient-reported outcomes (PRO) data related to physical function outcomes in the ambulatory care setting.
The winners are:
Grand Prize: PRISM
PRISM, PROMIS Reporting and Insight System from Minnesota, is an application that enhances the quality of clinical discussion between healthcare providers and patients by allowing for continued patient engagement outside of the clinical setting. Developed by a multi-disciplinary team including members from the University of Minnesota, Fairview/HealthEast Kidney Stone Institute, EMF Consulting, and digital health company PerkHealth, PRISM enables patients to complete physical function and other PROMIS measures through an easy-to-use app, with value-added features including score trending, peer group comparisons, and personalized recommendations for follow-up actions and education materials aimed to further engage patients in their care. The platform supports any PRO instrument and allows seamless data integration with EHRs via Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) to make data available for providers to use, in real-time, in their clinical care and shared decision making with the patient.
2nd Place: PEER Technologies
PEER Technologies PLLC’s application named “Back Pain Tracker” is a tool to enhance the Shared Decision Making (SDM) process for patients with chronic low back pain and their physicians. It strives to attend to the needs of patients with chronic back pain by leveraging a user-centered design approach, benchmarked pain and function scores from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS), and risk factor identification from the NIH Research Standards for Chronic Low Back Pain. Patients easily enter PRO data and are presented with comprehendible recommendations, including personalized estimates of normative outcomes based on patients' age, sex, and other characteristics. The goal is to integrate this mobile app into patient’s treatment plan by discussing scores and trends during clinical visits to inspire patient retention and continued use of the application over time.
3rd Place: cliexa
The cliexa HIPAA-compliant cross-communication platform improves the quality of care, clinical workflow, and time spent with patients. The cliexa-EASE helps clinics fully leveraging PRO data to integrate validated clinical assessments to patient intake and remote-monitoring processes while collecting clinical metrics and compliance data for quality reporting. The discrete clinical data and PRO data enable providers to improve clinical decision making while reducing liability and billing concerns.
