Editorial Commentary: Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) Needs an Anchor to Correlate Pain and Satisfactory Function in New Patient Orthopaedic Visits

In today's health care climate, the patient perspective is becoming increasingly important. As the health care paradigm shifts toward value-based health care, patient-reported outcomes are becoming increasingly important for not only research but for routine clinical care. While there are many outcome instruments used for musculoskeletal care, the addition of the simple question of "how are you doing" or "are your symptoms manageable" can provide additional valuable insight to the provider and help improve care using a shared decision model. In other words, if you want to know how the patient is doing, you have to ask them. This biopsychosocial approach demonstrates caring for the entire patient. The Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) is a patient-reported outcome instrument that was developed using the biopsychosocial model and has the advantage of being administered as a computer adaptive test. It can be used across health care and is comparable across medical specialties as the scores are standardized to US population-based norms. When used in isolation, PROMIS provides an idea of how the patient is doing compared with the population but does not give the insight as to how the patient is coping with their condition. The addition of an anchor question, such as their patient acceptable symptom state, adds further understanding to the individual patient.