Patient outcome refers to how the patient benefits (or not) from a treatment, procedure, surgery, etc. Basically: the condition of the patient after treatment.

It answers how the patent has improved or not improved. This is a very personal set of facts about a patient - did the person smoke - what age and sex are they,,,, and then - did the procedure help, or not - and to what extent.... This information can be useful for determining (along with data of other patients) how successful a path of treatment tends to be for similar patients. The information is used to determine if a person will likely benefit by looking at similar cases from this data.

Determining which patient outcome indicators may be appropriate to include in a primary care, practice performance tool is a difficult task. Unfortunately, no published studies currently document the opinions of these physicians regarding which indicators they most value. Objective: To ascertain the level of agreement among primary care physicians regarding the most salient patient outcome indicators for measuring performance in primary care.