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.

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.

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.