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.

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.