The Government response to the report of the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety, published July 2021, states ?Patient reported measures such as Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) and Patient Reported Experience Measures (PREMs) should become common currency in the assessment of the benefits and risks of current and new interventions? and “”Every interaction the patient has with a health service provider should be captured once only and by one or other data subset, ideally in the electronic health record. The NHS number should be included to enable those subsets to be linked. Commercial electronic options can be very costly for each NHS organisation with little opportunity to customise, evolve or expand. They often have a degree of vendor lock-in with inability to extract the stored data in a useful format, and little interoperability with existing I.T systems.

Instead of using commercial software, we can develop an open one collectively, reducing cost and delivering a best in class solution designed by its users. Developed in partnership with clinicians and PROMs experts, openOutcomes will be open source and based on open standards, as required by the NHS service standards. We have already completed approximately 25% of the development as a collaborative project run by a team of public, private and not-for-profit organisations, crowd funded by NHS organisations.

openOutcomes will increase compliance for completion of PROMs questionnaires by allowing patients to submit them via their mobile device or computer and include ability to automatically submit PROMs data to national registries with appropriate consent and permissions. Advanced reporting will allow outcomes to be evaluated at patient, clinician and population levels.