Electronic Personal Assessment Questionnaire (EPAQ) For Pelvic Floor

The electronic Personal Assessment Questionnaire-Pelvic Floor (ePAQ-PF) is the first electronic patient-reported outcome measure (ePROM) developed, tested, and deployed in clinical practice in pelvic floor medicine. ePAQ-PF assesses bladder, bowel, vaginal, and sexual symptoms as well as patients' concerns, goals, questions, and demographics (including age, parity, and BMI). The instrument has been used in clinical practice since 2005. ePAQ-PF measures pelvic floor symptoms and their impact over 20 scored domain areas. It provides a comprehensive patient-reported assessment of pelvic floor symptomatology and impact on health-related quality of life. The instrument is purely electronic, which provides a number of advantages in terms of reduction in burden of administration, collation, and retention of completed questionnaires and integration into electronic patient records. This chapter will discuss the background to the development of this tool, present the results of psychometric testing, and discuss the utility of ePROMs in urogynaecology. These include conditions where sensitive issues predominate, in virtual clinics, multidisciplinary team (MDT) meetings, and clinical research.