The emerging role of patient-centered outcomes research in shaping the future of healthcare delivery in India: A brief review

With the Indian patient becoming more empowered with regards to his disease and its treatment options, many Indian physicians still depend only on disease-related outcome measures to take health-care related decisions, and give minimal importance to patient-centered outcomes pertaining to the effect of the healthcare interventions on the patient’s well-being. Thus, objective lab values and physician intuition are given more importance than the subjective feeling of well-being that the patient is experiencing following the introduction of the intervention. This review presents a concept of integrating patient-centered and patient-reported data with the existing disease-centered and doctor-reported data for making healthcare-related decisions. This concept, termed patient-centered outcomes research, has already become popular in the Western World.