News

December 5-6, 2013 | Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Rockville, MD In a session on Population Models to Account for Quality-of-Life Measures, Dr. Ware presented a talk entitled, "Improving Quality of Life Outcomes Measures for Use in Tobacco Research: Lessons from Population Surveys and Clinical Research." Presentations in this session and a panel discussion covered methods for assessing changes in quality-of-life and other measures, which demonstrate the effects on morbidity due to tobacco use. The conference, hosted by the Center for Tobacco Products (CTP), was intended to stimulate discussion among academic researchers, industry participants, FDA scientists, and other stakeholders on the challenges and opportunities associated with using computer statistical modeling to assess the effects of tobacco products on population health.

August 18th – 20th, 2014 | 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 18, 2014 to August 20, 2014 at the Harvard School of Public Health. The lecture covered noteworthy conceptual and methodological developments in patient-reported outcomes (PRO) measurement, advantages of standardization (in both content, and underlying metrics), advances in psychometric methods and norm-based scoring (for both generic and disease-specific PROs), examples of improved electronic data capture and connectivity, and the future of more comprehensive and more practical PRO information systems in health care. Dr. Ware’s afternoon workshops during the Harvard course addressed “Advances in Integrating Generic and Disease-Specific Assessments and Making them More Efficient and Useful.” Objectives included discussing how both the content and scoring of disease-specific QOL impact measures can be standardized, how to evaluate improvements in disease-specifi8c and generic QOL surveys, and how reduced respondent burden can be achieved without sacrificing reliability and validity. Examples from ongoing outcome registries were presented. More information can be found here.

August 19th – 21st, 2013 | 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 August 19, 2013 to August 21, 2013 at the Harvard School of Public Health. The lecture covered noteworthy conceptual and methodological developments, advantages of standardization (in both content and underlying metrics), advances in psychometric methods and norm-based scoring (for both generic and disease-specific PROs), examples of improved electronic data capture and connectivity, and the future of more comprehensive and more practical PRO information systems in health care. Dr. Ware’s afternoon Harvard course workshops addressed “Integrating and Improving Generic and Disease-Specific Assessments.” Objectives included discussing how both the content and scoring of disease-specific QOL impact measures can be standardized, how to evaluate improvements in QOL impact survey efficiency, and how reduced respondent burden can be achieved without sacrificing reliability and validity. More information can be found here.

October 21-24, 2012 | Berlin, Germany Dr. Ware gave a keynote speech as part of the special satellite session “Information Technology for Health” at the prestigious World Health Summit held in Berlin, Germany, on October 24, 2012. His topic was information technology advances enabling standardization of patient-reported outcome (PRO) metrics and more comprehensive (integrated disease-specific and generic PROs), better integrated (traditional clinical and PRO information) and more efficient (more practical and more precise) PRO assessment systems.

August 15th – 17th, 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.