title: Are all outcomes in chronic heart failure rated equally? An argument for a patient-centred approach to outcome assessment.
abstract: Chronic heart failure (CHF) is a multi-dimensional and complex syndrome. Outcome measures are important for determining both the efficacy and quality of care and capturing the patient's perspective in evaluating the outcomes of health care delivery. Capturing the patient's perspective via patient-reported outcomes is increasingly important; however, including objective measures such as mortality would provide more complete account of outcomes important to patients. Currently, no single measure for CHF outcomes captures all dimensions of the quality of care from the patient's perspective. To describe the role of outcome measures in CHF from the perspective of patients, a structured literature review was undertaken. This review discusses the concepts and methodological issues related to measurement of CHF outcomes. Outcome assessment at the level of the patient, provider and health care system were identified as being important. The perspectives of all stakeholders should be considered when developing an outcomes measurement suite to inform CHF health care. This paper recommends that choice of outcome measures should depend on their ability to provide a comprehensive, comparable, meaningful and accurate assessment that are important to patient.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Health Science, Curtin University, Sydney, Australia, s.chang@uws.edu.au.
authors.forename: Sungwon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Chang
authors.forename: Phillip J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Newton
authors.forename: Sally
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Inglis
authors.forename: Tim
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Luckett
authors.forename: Henry
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Krum
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Macdonald
authors.forename: Patricia M
authors.initials: PM
authors.lastname: Davidson
mesh_terms: D002908:Chronic Disease; D006333:Heart Failure / Q000628:therapy*; D006801:Humans; D017063:Outcome Assessment, Health Care; D018802:Patient-Centered Care / Q000379:methods*; D011788:Quality of Life; D016896:Treatment Outcome