The Patient Report of Problems™
(PROP™)
The Patient Report of Problems (PROP) is an open-ended patient-reported outcome where patients are asked to describe their most bothersome problems in their own words. These descriptions (called “verbatims”) are analyzed by natural language processing (NLP) technology to extract information about specific symptoms, their severity and priority, and what makes them better or worse.
The PROP offers many benefits in clinical research, including:
Patient-Centric Data: The PROP focuses on collecting data directly from patients in their own words, which helps ensure that the data is relevant and meaningfully represents patient experiences. This addresses the challenge of capturing patient-reported outcomes often underrepresented in clinical trials and mostly limited to multiple-choice surveys.
Broader Symptom Coverage: The PROP is designed to capture a wide range of symptoms since it is not limited to the symptoms usually associated with an investigated disease or condition. For example, in Parkinson’s disease, apart from typical motor symptoms, the PROP also captures non-motor symptoms in the cognitive, sleep, and psychiatric domains, among others. In Parkinson’s disease, the PROP distinguishes as many as 66 different symptoms. This approach provides a more comprehensive picture of patient health progression and the effects of treatments, addressing the challenge of incomplete symptom tracking.
Enhanced Symptom Tracking: The PROP uses the latest NLP and machine learning algorithms to classify and interpret patient-reported symptoms accurately. This allows for a more precise tracking of symptoms over time, which is crucial for evaluating the efficacy of treatments in clinical trials.
Improved Data Interpretation: The PROP enhances the interpretation of patient-reported data by integrating expert curation and disease-specific ontologies. This helps in accurately identifying and classifying symptoms, which can improve the overall quality of data used in clinical trials.
Facilitating Clinical Decision-Making: The insights gained from PROP data can ultimately inform clinical decision-making by highlighting the most significant symptoms and changes in patient conditions, potentially leading to improved treatment strategies and patient outcomes. While today, the PROP enhances the quality and relevance of patient experience data collected in clinical trials to assist the development of more effective treatments, tomorrow, such data can lead to better-informed clinical decisions and the application of these treatments in clinical care.
The PROP was developed with generous support from The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, among other organizations, and acquired by Modality.AI in 2022. Since then, it has been integrated into Modality’s multimodal AI platform, where the virtual guide, Tina, administers the PROP in a spoken conversation with clinical study participants.
Further detailed information is available via PROP Publications.
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