Cutting Edge Solutions to Improving the Efficiency of PRO Measurement

October 23^nd, 2015 | 22^nd Annual Meeting of the International Society for Quality of Life Research (ISOQOL), Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Dr. Ware presented “Cutting Edge Solutions to Improving the Efficiency of PRO Measurement: From Real-Data Simulations to Pilot Testing Before and After Total Joint Replacement in a National Registry,” a paper co-authored with Barbara Gandek from John Ware Research Group (JWRG) and the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS), Worcester, MA and Patricia Franklin and Celeste Lemay from UMMS.  The pilot test was a real-world implementation of the QOLIX^® monitoring system, which integrates and standardizes generic and disease-specific patient-reported outcomes (PRO) measures.

At the core of this new approach is the Quality of Life Disease Impact Scale (QDIS^®) developed by JWRG to fill the gap between disease-specific symptoms that do not measure quality of life (QOL) and generic PRO measures that are not disease-specific. Previous studies comparing QDIS with legacy (SF-12^® Health Survey, SF-36^® Health Survey) measures have shown that QDIS is markedly more valid in discriminating differences in disease severity and standardized QDIS content and scoring enables the first individualized aggregate index of QOL burden across multiple conditions. Simulation studies had also shown that computer adaptive methods could make reliable assessments much more practical.

This pilot test in an ongoing surgical registry demonstrated that the advantages of the QDIS can be practically achieved on the Internet from clinic or home and suggests that a very brief QDIS overall comorbidity impact estimate may be useful in explaining variations in 6-month generic physical health outcomes.