About the BREAST-Q
The last two decades in plastic surgery has seen tremendous progress in the sophistication of surgical techniques and the delivery of care. To support these advancements we require more refined ways to examine the satisfaction and quality of life of our patients. Traditional measures such as complications data and photo analysis fail to capture all key aspects of outcome when used alone.
An increasing demand for patient reported outcomes (PRO) data also exists; not only to advance surgical techniques, but to advocate for patients and facilitate negotiations with healthcare payers.
As clearly delineated by the FDA, “PRO instruments can be developed to measure what patients want and expect from their treatment and what is most important to them. Formal assessment of patient-reported outcomes thus offers important insights that complement what is known from the clinicians’ perspective. In addition, surgeons and researchers are increasingly mindful of how ‘patient perceptions’ may differ from those of providers. In aesthetic breast surgery, for example, a ‘perfect result’ from the surgeon’s perspective may not be perceived as such by the patient. Thus, in the current environment of surgical quality surveillance and healthcare restrictions, we are rapidly moving towards rigorous measurement of patient-reported outcomes in order to fully appraise the benefits of cosmetic and reconstructive breast surgery.
To date there are many different questionnaires used in breast surgery. None, however have been conceptually grounded in patient perceptions, able to span the continuum of impact of surgery or validated against appropriate psychometric benchmarks. The BREAST-Q© was developed to address this need.
The BREAST-Q© will compliment current clinical outcome measures and will facilitate multi-center studies for comparison of surgical techniques and patient populations. By quantifying patient satisfaction and HR-QOL experienced by women undergoing breast surgery, the BREAST-Q can support advocacy, cost-effectiveness analysis and patient education. The BREAST-Q will provide individual surgeons with an important metric for documenting clinical performance appraisal and improvement. As quality metrics and pay for performance become increasingly central to healthcare reform, such data will be crucial for individual surgeons and for plastic surgery as a specialty.
