Individuals with multiple chronic conditions (MCCs) have two or more chronic health conditions. While healthcare has traditionally focused on the needs of single-disease patients, increasing evidence suggests that MCCs may be becoming the norm, rather than the exception. MCC patients have multiple needs that require assessment and care from multiple providers, who need to integrate diverse perspectives, information, and interventions. Since case mixes and populations have high patient-to-patient variability, standardized protocols and disease-specific treatment guidelines are of limited applicability. In fact, patient-centered care implies a dynamic, adaptive, and interactive process of configuring the components of a health system around individuals’ multiple needs.
The two broad categories of patient-reported measures are patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) and patient-reported experience measures (PREMs). PROMs contain questions on experiential domains of health; whereas PREMs contain questions regarding patients’ experiences receiving care, such as accessibility, quality of communication, care coordination and decision-making. The potential of patient-reported measures as tools for fostering a patient-centered approach to care can only be maximized by considering the processes through which they are meant to affect change.