Technology can help health care providers understand their patients’ experience of illness in a way that was previously impossible. Experience in using health information technology (IT) to capture this information through PROs within rheumatology suggests that careful attention to human centered design, including detailed workflow planning, consideration of patient and physician burden, integration into the health IT ecosystem, and delivering information to the right person at the right time are all important. Technology applications must be tested in diverse health systems and populations to ensure they are simple to interpret, useful for clinical decision making and effective in impacting outcomes.