Ware Lecture Tour in Japan

September 29th – October 26th, 2018 | Kyoto, Sapporo, Tokyo, Isehara, and Nara City in Japan

Dr. Ware will present a series of lectures at conferences and university medical schools in September and October.  Lectures begin with a September 29 plenary keynote entitled “Patient-reported Health Measures are Linking Treatment Outcomes to Population Health" at the Society for Clinical Epidemiology annual meeting in Kyoto followed by a September 30 lecture on new JWRG disease-specific and generic health-related quality of life measures translated for use in population surveys and clinical research in Japan.  New surveys include a 10-item quality of life (QOL) short-form (QGEN^®) developed in the US as an improvement over the SF-36^® Health Survey and being normed in Japan, and a new 7-item QOL Disease-specific Impact Scale (QDIS^®) that uses disease-specific attributions to increase validity and responsiveness to one condition in the presence of multiple comorbid conditions. 

Dr. Ware also will comment on the history of conceptualization and measurement of QOL and important new survey tools and computerized adaptive test (CAT) developments in Japan, US and elsewhere at the Kyoto meeting and in subsequent lectures at Hokkaido University in Sapporo (October 3), Tokai University in Isehara (October 19), Kyoto University (October 22), and a symposium entitled “Consider QOL for Diabetes Patients” at the Ligare Kasugano hotel in Nara City (October 26) sponsored by MSD K.K.

These lectures will cover the more than 40-year evolution of conceptualizing and measuring patient-reported outcomes (PROs) and noteworthy milestones. Advances include: applications of item response theory (IRT) and waves of development of very homogeneous item banks that require increasing the number of generic PRO scales; contrasting efforts to develop summary measures that reduce the number of outcomes; new “super" short-form items that improve psychometric performance over legacy items; and standardized IRT-based metrics common to new and legacy generic PROs.  These advances also enable a new generation of more comprehensive and responsive disease-specific PROs that are standardized across diseases and yield a norm-based summary score that fills the gap between disease-specific symptoms that are not QOL and generic QOL measures that are not disease-specific.  These measures are powered by a new kind of adaptive survey logic that automatically adapts to the presence of multiple conditions and enables a more practical solution to integrating disease-specific and generic measures into a common “dashboard” of PROs.