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October 20, 2017 | 24th Annual Conference of the International Society for Quality of Life Research (ISOQOL), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Because all surveys begin with the first item, at the core of advances in patient-reported outcome measurement are better single-item measures of the most frequently-measured health domains. For many outcomes monitoring and cost prediction purposes in the future, the shortest health survey forms will administer only the best single item for each domain. Also, because the first item determines what happens next in adaptive surveys, more efficient single-item measurement is crucial. At the 24th Annual ISOQOL Conference, Drs. Ware and Gandek summarized advances in understanding of the content that best represents health domains and the implications of better operational definitions for capturing the essence of each domain, focusing on the Physical Function, Vitality and Mental Health domains. Survey items were self-administered on the Internet to representative samples of U.S. adults (N=2,938), ages 18-94. Results for new General Quality of Life (QGEN®) 10-item form items were compared with SF-36 and PROMIS-29 items for the same domains and in terms of how well they predicted SF-36 physical and mental component summary measures, to identify the reasons for superior item performance. Multiple psychometric criteria and tests of convergent and discriminant validity were reported. They reported that the best single-item measures were not found within the Medical Outcomes Study SF-36 or PROMIS-29 multiple-item scales or global items from those projects. Significant improvements in QGEN single-item performance, in comparison with SF-36 and PROMIS-29 for the same […]

September 25th-27th, 2017 | Harvard School of Public Health,Boston, MA Dr. Ware will present 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 September 25-27 at the Harvard School of Public Health. The lecture will cover the 40-year evolution of survey content and 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 include new features of items shown to improve their performance over legacy items, standardized underlying metrics for the domains common to most legacy generic PROs, and a new generation of standardized disease-specific PROs that 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 “The How and Why of Integrating Disease-Specific and Generic Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMS)”, Dr. Ware will discuss the use of QOL impact attributions to specific diseases to improve the validity and responsiveness of disease-specific measures, how improved measures can be integrated and compared in a profile that can be standardized across diseases, and the first norm-based scoring for disease-specific measures for the chronically-ill population.  Case studies from early adoptions of these advances in academic medical center applications and clinical trials will be discussed. 

January 27th – 28th, 2014 | Group R&D, British American Tobacco (Investments) Ltd., Southampton, UK Dr. Ware presented an invited lecture covering noteworthy milestones in the history of patient-reported outcomes (PRO) including a new generation of standardized disease-specific PROs, the QOL Disease-specific Impact Scale (QDIS®), that fill the gap between widely-used disease-specific measures that do not measure quality of life (QOL) and generic QOL measures that do not measure disease-specific outcomes.  In his workshop, Dr. Ware showed how both the content and scoring of condition-specific QOL impact measures, including measures of the QOL impact attributed to smoking, can be standardized across conditions using QDIS and how norm-based scoring can make interpretation much easier. Dr. Ware also presented examples of how to test whether survey respondents who have multiple conditions such as arthritis and asthma are able to make valid ratings of the QOL impact of each condition using QDIS.  Another consideration of particular importance in smoking research that focuses on otherwise well smokers (free of chronic health problems) is the range of PRO measurement and whether the measurement “ceiling” is high enough to detect improvements with decreased tobacco exposure.  The ceiling effect observed for the SF-36® Physical Functioning scale (59%) was lowered using JWRG’s new QGEN® Physical Functioning alternative scale (35%), enabling detection of a more favorable functional outcome with reduced toxicant prototype exposure that would otherwise have been missed in a recent clinical trial.  Support for this lecture and workshop was provided by an unrestricted research grant to John […]

November 2-6, 2013 | Dublin, Ireland A presentation entitled "The Validity of Quality Of Life Attributions to Specific Diseases: A Multitrait-Multimethod Comparison" was delivered by Dr. Rick Guyer of JWRG at the 16th Annual ISPOR European Congress in Dublin Ireland on November 4th, 2013. This study tested the convergent and discriminant validity of disease-specific quality of life (QOL) impact attributions using the Campbell and Fiske (1959) multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) approach. The study expands beyond previous empirical tests of the new Quality of Life Disease Impact Scale (QDIS®) by focusing on adults with three comorbid conditions. Results strongly support the convergent and discriminant validity of QDIS survey measures of disease-specific QOL impact attributed specifically to hip/knee, cardiovascular, and pulmonary conditions.

February 12th, 2016 | Cleveland Clinic Neurological Institute, Center for Outcomes Research & Evaluation, Cleveland, Ohio Dr. Ware presented a seminar on the latest patient-reported outcome (PRO) measurement developments and their implications for clinical research and practice and had open discussions with researchers and clinicians actively involved in patient-centered data initiatives at Cleveland Clinic on February 12, 2016. The seminar briefly summarized the history of PRO measurement and some of its most innovative and important recent conceptual and methodological advances. These advances include the standardization of metrics across population surveys, patient registries, clinical trials and clinical practice applications; methods that are adapted to the specific requirements of different applications while maintaining score comparability across applications; a new generation of disease-specific PROs that use comprehensive 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; more aggressive approaches to making PRO measures more practical and more useful; and the first standardized and individualized disease-specific QOL impact measures that enable norm-based scoring throughout the chronically-ill population. Feedback from early adoptions of these advances was discussed.