Electronic patient-reported outcomes (ePRO) are becoming more popular in clinical trials as researchers and sponsors seek to improve data quality, patient experience, trial design, user guide development, and trial participant selection.
According to ObvioHealth, ePRO allows patients to answer questions and report on their health through electronic devices, such as computers or mobile phones. This allows for more timely and accurate data collection, which can improve the quality and accuracy of clinical data.
ePRO can also provide a more engaging patient experience, which may lead to higher patient retention and compliance. In addition, ePRO can help to improve the trial design by providing insights into how patients use the trial intervention and how they experience it. ePRO can also be used to develop better user guides and to select more appropriate trial participants.
In this article we will explore the benefits of using electronic patient-reported outcomes in clinical trials, discuss some of the challenges that researchers and sponsors face.
Better Efficiency for Research Teams and Participants
ePRO helps to reduce the timeline for getting back results from patients. It is much faster and more efficient than using paper diaries or surveys. Once a patient completes their electronic case report form, or eCRF, the results are instantly available to the researchers on the system’s database.
Features like push notifications and reminders help the patients stay on track with reporting their outcomes, and this also allows the research teams to immediately access and analyze the data as soon as possible for efficient treatment.
Smoother Experience for Study Participants
The study participants use ePRO through mobile apps on their phones and tablets. The interface of ePRO is designed to be user-friendly and can be very practical. Patients can easily adapt to ePRO just like they would with any other social media or mobile phone app. The apps allow the study participants to provide more detailed information like videos, photos, and location or GPS pins. These details can be filled in the electronic case report form (eCRF).
Data Errors Prevention
While it is completely normal to find errors in paper diaries and surveys resulting from human error, paper-based data collection methods are not accurate when checking for errors. The use of excel formulas is still not highly precise in performing edit checks.
Bigger studies that involve a larger number of study participants usually involve a lot of data. The amount of resources and time required for such studies is reduced significantly when using ePRO systems to enter the data electronically. Imagine trying to read the different handwritings of the many different study participants, some of them being eligible, and some of the data having errors in units. It can get quite hectic for the research team members and medical staff.
Better Compliance
It has been noted that study participants are more actively interested in reporting through ePRO than when asked to write on paper surveys. The use of mobile apps has significantly increased the level of accuracy in studies. This has seen a rise in the use of ePRO & ELNs around facilities.
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