How do patient-reported outcomes compare with clinician assessments? A prospective study of radiation dermatitis in breast cancer

Highlights: • Patient- and clinician-reported outcomes consistently demonstrated low agreement. • Clinicians significantly underreported all symptoms in relation to patients. • Use of patient-reported outcomes in routine practice may improve symptom management. • A new tool is needed to score symptoms from the patient and clinician perspectives. Breast cancer patients frequently develop radiation dermatitis (RD) when undergoing post-operative radiation therapy (RT). Traditional RD assessment methods measure clinician-reported outcomes (CROs), but patient-reported outcomes (PROs) have gained recent popularity. The purpose of this prospective analysis was to compare PROs with CROs of breast RD.