This Guidance for Industry was issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2009 regarding the appropriate use of patient-reported outcome (PRO) measures to support labeling claims in the development of medical products. This FDA Guidance is the source of the commonly used definition of PROs: “any report of the status of a patient’s health condition that comes directly from the patient, without interpretation of the patient’s response by a clinician or anyone else.”
According to the FDA Guidance:
…findings measured by a well-defined and reliable PRO instrument in appropriately designed investigations can be used to support a claim in medical product labeling if the claim is consistent with the instrument’s documented measurement capability. The amount and kind of evidence that should be provided to the FDA is the same as for any other labeling claim based on other data. Use of a PRO instrument is advised when measuring a concept best known by the patient or best measured from the patient perspective. A PRO instrument, like physician-based instruments, should be shown to measure the concept it is intended to measure, and the FDA will review the evidence that a particular PRO instrument measures the concept claimed. The concepts measured by PRO instruments that are most often used in support of labeling claims refer to a patient’s symptoms, signs, or an aspect of functioning directly related to disease status. PRO measures often represent the effect of disease (e.g., heart failure or asthma) on health and functioning from the patient perspective.
Ignatius Bau 