April 12, 2018 | 39th Annual Meeting of the Society of Behavioral Medicine, New Orleans, Louisiana In a panel discussion session entitled “PHQ-9: Is it a Good Match for Integrated Primary Care?,” at the annual meeting of the Society of Behavioral Medicine, Dr. Ware will summarize how the adoption of measures used in the routine monitoring of generic physical and mental health outcomes can be used to more efficiently screen and manage patients in greatest need of mental and behavioral health services. The session will be chaired by Jennifer S. Funderburk, PhD from the VA Center for Integrated Healthcare. Other panelists will include Kurt Kroenke, MD, co-developer of the PHQ-9, and Rodger S. Kessler, PhD, an expert researcher on integrated care. The discussion will be led and summarized by William Douglas Tynan, PhD, a leader within the American Psychological Association on integrated health care.

November 5th-8th, 2017 | 2017 NCRI Cancer Conference, Liverpool, UK In a session entitled “Quality of Life – from PROMs to ICERs” at the 2017 NCRI Cancer Conference, Dr. Ware will summarize advances in PRO measurement and their implications for effectiveness research. Understanding has never been greater regarding the: (1) breadth of health concepts that are essential for validity in quantifying patient reported outcomes (PROs); (2) importance of matching operational definitions (e.g., behavioral functioning, subjective ill-being and well-being,personal evaluation) to each health concept; (3) advantages of better single items for both psychometric and utility methods; and (4) implications of standardizing metrics across a wide range of higher and lower levels of health to enable comparisons of results across diverse populations. For example,meaningful comparisons can be made between population norms, average scores for treated and untreated groups, and individual scores for patients with mild to severe conditions, using standardized metrics for a composite (psychometric or utility) score or a profile of outcome scores.Because all surveys begin with the first item, at the core of advances in both generic and disease-specific PRO surveys are significantly better single-item measures that can and should be standardized across psychometric and utility methods. Although the enumeration of these measures differs across the two methods, their concept representation and item content should not. For most respondents and for some measurement purposes (e.g., calculation of composite scores), the best single item can be the only one administered for each health concept. The proven features of such “super items” […]

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 […]