Hello. Could you please tell me if we could try to evaluate patients’ health outcomes in our program evaluation? I understand it is risky. Maybe our program is not so effective, but it is worth trying. Right?

My pleasure.

That’s so kind of you for the detailed reply.

Improved health outcomes of patients are unquestionably a prime goal for patients' intervention or support programs; however, a serious problem with using health outcomes for evaluation purposes is that it may take years for many of these outcomes to show the effects of improved self-management. An assessment that uses a relatively short follow-up period (a year, for example), as most do, is unlikely to be able to detect improvement in such outcomes.