Effectiveness and health benefits in the treatment of musculoskeletal disorders

Published January 12, 2024

Musculoskeletal disorders are the most common reason for visiting a doctor in Finland. Although these conditions rarely pose a direct threat to life, they have a significant impact on people’s quality of life and functional ability. Our population is aging, and the prevalence of age-related tissue degeneration problems, such as osteoarthritis, is increasing. The challenge for our healthcare system is to allocate treatment and the tax resources used for it in such a way that our shared, limited resources are sufficient to cover the necessary services. Measuring treatment effectiveness and the resulting health benefit is therefore an important tool for finding optimal solutions for funders, organizers, and patients alike.

Treatment effectiveness

Historically, the effects of treatment in medicine have been described from a professional perspective – for example, surgeons reporting how patients appeared to have recovered after surgery. However, only the individual can reliably report on their own health and recovery and is therefore the best expert on the benefit they have received from treatment. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being. Measuring quality of life and functional ability is therefore a good way to assess health status, as it provides information on the real impact of a disease or symptom on everyday life.

To systematically measure treatment impact, general and disease-specific quality-of-life instruments based on the patient’s own assessment have been developed at an accelerating pace in recent years. These precise questionnaires map the symptoms, limitations, and inconveniences experienced by the patient in relation to a specific condition, and from these responses, relative scores are calculated. This is essentially like a self-assigned “school grade” for one’s current health status. By comparing the grade before and after treatment, a simple subtraction can estimate the change in health status achieved through treatment – i.e., treatment effectiveness.

What are the benefits of measuring effectiveness?

Effectiveness measurement is an important part of shared decision-making in care and involves the most important participant – the person responsible for their own health.

The patient’s assessment of their health status can be used as feedback for the treatment funder, organizer, and the patient themselves, as well as for developing and comparing different treatment methods. When the calculation includes the costs incurred from treatment as a divisor, we can speak of the health benefit achieved through treatment. Assessing health benefit helps decision-making when allocating shared resources within a wellbeing services county. Treatment development is a continuous process, where it is important to identify factors related to both care and the patient that influence outcomes, in order to achieve the best possible results and avoid risks. Such ongoing “real-world effectiveness research” can also raise new research questions that can be tested further in more detailed studies and experimental settings.

Challenges in Measuring Effectiveness

We are all increasingly receiving various surveys and email inquiries about our experiences – for example, after a car service or a shopping trip. Many of these surveys probably end up in the trash or are answered very superficially. However, reporting disease-specific quality of life often concerns a unique condition and its treatment, which may affect the rest of a person’s life. Careful responses to these questionnaires help in shared decision-making, monitoring recovery, and continuously improving care. Research and development are still needed to make questionnaires more concise and multilingual, without losing essential content.