We would like to express our gratitude to the commentators for their thoughtful and insightful responses to our paper (McGrail et al. 2011). Our purpose in preparing the article was essentially to issue a call to arms for the use of patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) in Canadian healthcare. It is our interpretation that all of the commentaries, in broad terms, support the call: the focus was less on the whether and far more on the how. We were particularly struck by the elegant characterization of the issues in Wu and Snyder's (2011) extension of our analogy to the high-school senior prom: what to wear, whom to go with and how to get there.