Measurement, Design, and Analysis Methods for Health Outcomes Research Course: Ware Lecture and Workshop

August 17th – 19th, 2015 | Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA

Dr. Ware presented his annual lecture entitled “New Techniques for Health Outcomes Measurement and Evaluation” at the Measurement, Design, and Analysis Methods for Health Outcomes Research course held from August 17-19 at the Harvard School of Public Health. The lecture covered noteworthy milestones in the history of patient-reported outcomes (PRO) as well as some of the most innovative and important recent conceptual and methodological advances.  The latter included a new generation of standardized (both content and scoring) disease-specific PROs that fill the gap between widely-used disease-specific measures that are not QOL and generic QOL measures that are not disease-specific.  In the afternoon workshop, entitled “Integrating Generic and Disease-Specific Assessments:  What Are the Issues?”  Dr. Ware discussed how both the content and scoring of disease-specific QOL impact measures can be standardized across diseases and how norm-based scoring of disease-specific measures can be accomplished in the chronically-ill population.  The recently-published QOL Disease-Specific Impact Scale (QDIS^®) was used to illustrate how the convergent and discriminant validity of disease-specific QOL impact ratings is being tested among adults with multiple comorbid conditions (MCC) in an ongoing NIH/AHRQ-sponsored study.  A second case study from an ongoing national registry will focus on a powerful new adaptive survey logic that automatically adapts to the presence of  MCC while also estimating outcomes equivalent to the metrics underlying widely-used legacy PROs without administering the latter.  Despite the more comprehensive information collected in this small-sample field test,  surveys were faster for most patients in comparison with state-of-the-art PRO surveys that were administered in parallel.