Measuring perioperative outcome.

Abstract

Measuring clinically relevant and patient-centered perioperative outcomes provides the knowledge that enables clinicians to optimize their practice and guide shared decision-making, researchers to set a future agenda and policymakers to prioritize healthcare spending. A large international collaboration is currently working to define a set of core outcomes for use in perioperative medicine research. Standardizing which outcomes are measured and how they are defined will help ensure that perioperative research output is meaningful and practice changing. The ability to pool nonheterogeneous data from multiple clinical trials will also improve ability of research to provide definitive answers and improve the cost-effectiveness of research spending. Future clinical trials in perioperative medicine should utilize clearly defined, validated and standardized patient-centered outcome measures.