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June 24th 2015:  Center on Behavior and Health (VCBH), University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont Dr. Ware lectured on conceptual and methodological milestones in patient-reported outcomes (PRO) measurement development.  He introduced a new generation of disease-specific PROs that fill the gap between widely-used disease-specific measures that are not health-related quality of life (QOL) and generic QOL measures that are not disease-specific.  Dr. Ware showed how both the content and scoring of disease-specific QOL impact measures has been standardized across diseases to enable norm-based scoring and interpretation of disease-specific PROs in the chronically-ill US population.  Results from a pilot demonstration test in an ongoing surgical registry illustrated how a powerful new adaptive survey logic can automatically adapt PROs to capture the impact of multiple chronic conditions to make comprehensive measurement more practical.

December 3rd, 2012 | Bethesda, MD Dr. Ware presented his annual lecture "Quality of Life Update – 2012" for the "Introduction to the Principles and Practice of Clinical Research" course offered by the National Institutes of Health on December 3rd. This was Dr. Ware's 14th IPPCR lecture. He focused on advances in integrating disease-specific and generic PROs while illustrating comprehensive generic and disease-specific patient reported outcomes (PRO) measurement. More information on attending the course directly, or remotely can be found here.

October 20th, 2016 | 23rd Annual Conference of the International Society for Quality of Life Research (ISOQOL), Copenhagen, Denmark Dr. Ware presented an address entitled “From Populations to Patients: Progress, Challenges and Solutions for Better Understanding Health Outcomes” in the opening plenary of the 23rd Annual ISOQOL Conference. He provided his perspectives on advances made in the health-related quality of life (HRQOL) measurement field over the past few decades, the major challenges in the field today, and potential conceptual, methodological and technical solutions for these challenges. Dr. Ware also participated in a session in which he and other senior researchers gave advice to new researchers on successful strategies for dealing with challenges in their research and career paths. In addition, he took part in a roundtable discussion on the pros and cons of disease-specific and generic HRQOL measures. JWRG’s Director of Research, Barbara Gandek, also gave a presentation entitled “Can the Accuracy of Generic Health Outcome Predictions Be Improved Using Individualized Disease-Specific QOL Impact Scales?” at the conference. This presentation compared the accuracy of alternative approaches to measuring total disease impact among heterogeneous populations with multiple chronic conditions. Advances in this area are particularly important for improving case-mix adjustment when generic HRQOL measures are used in observational studies. More information about the ISOQOL conference can be found here.

December 2nd, 2013 | Bethesda, MD Dr. Ware presented the annual lecture "Quality of Life Update – 2013” for the "Introduction to the Principles and Practice of Clinical Research" course offered by the National Institutes of Health on December 3rd. This was Dr. Ware's 15th IPPCR lecture; it focused on the advantages of integrating disease-specific and generic patient reported outcome (PRO) measures while using norm-based scoring to interpret both types of PRO measures. Plans for forthcoming NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) network presentations are intended to create a "Virtual University" that will include the Clinical Center’s core clinical research curriculum. More information on the NIH course can be found here.

October 23nd, 2015 | 22nd 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 […]