Overview
The term outcomes, is generally applied to both the concept of clinic-based research and to performance measurement. Clinic-based research needs the rigor of a study protocol and is generally directed toward finding the evidence in Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM).  Performance on the other hand is generally looking to see how well a clinician, group, practice, etc is meeting some goal, norm or set-point.  From the standpoint of an Electronic Patient Interview, both types of information can be gathered by adding trigger logic to administer the appropriate categorical and phase questions along with the normal clinical questions and measures.  Outcomes are nothing more than a simple extension of the normal clinical process, gathering the information needed to organize your data for later analysis. 

Clinic-based research
How rigorously the study protocol needs to be enforced, depends on the intended use of the research results.  More often than not clinics are just trying to measure treatment effectiveness and it is easiest to simply mirror the normal office visit protocol associated with the treatment (generically initial visit, follow-up, re-evaluation and disposition).  Looking at long-term results can be a bit more problematic.  If you are sampling patients who are still coming in the office, they're probably the ones still having problems, which dramatically skews the sample.  Getting access to patients for long-term samples, who are not coming in the office is a bit more difficult but as everyone becomes more Internet enabled this is becoming less of a problem.

Performance
Performance is becoming a bigger topic as pay-for-performance and transparency continue to become mainstream.  Performance can be measured by adding categorical variables (which clinician, group, etc) to the same protocol-based information used for clinic-based research, or more simply, by measuring the patient's perception of the experience (perceived outcome, Quality-of-Life, satisfaction, etc).  Usually pay-for-performance and transparency measures are claims-based since that is the information generally available, but if clinicians really want to get a handle on performance and apply it to practice improvement, adding some questions to an Electronic Patient Interview is a great solution. 

Please Contact Us to learn more or discuss how Outcomes & Performance measurement might work in your setting.