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

August 15^th – 17^th, 2016 | 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 15-17 at the Harvard School of Public Health. The lecture covered noteworthy milestones in the history of patient-reported outcomes (PROs) as well as some of the most innovative and important recent conceptual and methodological advances.  The latter included standardized metrics for the domains measured by legacy generic PROs and a new generation of standardized disease-specific PROs that use disease-specific QOL impact attributions to fill the gap between disease-specific symptoms 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 and the Solutions?”  Dr. Ware discussed how PRO profiles and profiles across specific diseases can be integrated and compared and how the content of disease-specific and generic QOL impact measures can be standardized across diseases to enable the first disease-specific aggregation of QOL impact across multiple chronic conditions and the first norm-based scoring of disease-specific measures for the chronically-ill population.  Case studies from early adoptions of these advances in academic medical center applications and clinical trials were discussed.