Reinventing real-time patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) in clinical practice: Realizing the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve communication between patients and clinicians.
Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) are questionnaires in which patients self-report symptom severity. While PROMs can improve clinical communication and health outcomes, there are common barriers to PROMs completion, such as difficulties interpreting and answering questions and cultural differences in symptom expression, which may disproportionately affect anglophone and allophone patients, in addition to the overall challenges these groups face in navigating Québec's predominantly francophone healthcare system. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize PROMs collection for these underserved populations. Our team aims to develop an AI-driven process by which anglophone and allophone patients can report PROMs-like data verbally, in an organic, narrative format using their preferred language, with information transmitted to clinicians in real-time as a concise structured summary. As a first step, we will develop and validate a process for extracting PROMs-like information from narrative clinical notes in the electronic health record, using a large language model (LLM). We will use data from the electronic Implementation of Patient-reported Outcomes Across cancer care in Québec (e-IMPAQc) project, focusing on anglophone and allophone patients. Using an LLM on the McGill University Health Centre’s internal server, we will iteratively refine a process to extract PROMs-like data from narrative text. This project will help develop AI-powered solutions to reduce language barriers, improve clinical communication, and enhance healthcare access for Québec's linguistic minority communities.
Outputs:
Daskalo, C., Moore, A., Boone, E., Durieux, B., Loban, K., Kreutzer, T., Lambert, S., & Poenaru, D. (2026, July). Reimagining patient-reported outcomes with generative AI: From clinical narratives to patient voice [Abstract submitted for conference presentation]. 24th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME 2026), Ottawa, ON, Canada. https://aime26.aimedicine.info/