News

August 19th – 21st, 2013 | 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 August 19, 2013 to August 21, 2013 at the Harvard School of Public Health. The lecture covered noteworthy conceptual and methodological developments, 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 Harvard course workshops addressed “Integrating and Improving Generic and Disease-Specific Assessments.” Objectives included discussing how both the content and scoring of disease-specific QOL impact measures can be standardized, how to evaluate improvements in QOL impact survey efficiency, and how reduced respondent burden can be achieved without sacrificing reliability and validity. More information can be found here.

October 21-24, 2012 | Berlin, Germany Dr. Ware gave a keynote speech as part of the special satellite session “Information Technology for Health” at the prestigious World Health Summit held in Berlin, Germany, on October 24, 2012. His topic was information technology advances enabling standardization of patient-reported outcome (PRO) metrics and more comprehensive (integrated disease-specific and generic PROs), better integrated (traditional clinical and PRO information) and more efficient (more practical and more precise) PRO assessment systems.

August 15th – 17th, 2016 | Harvard School of Public Health, 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 15-17 at the Harvard School of Public Health. The lecture covered 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 included standardized metrics for the domains measured by legacy generic PROs and a new generation of standardized disease-specific PROs that use 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.  In the afternoon workshop, entitled “Integrating Generic and Disease-Specific Assessments:  What Are the Issues and the Solutions?”  Dr. Ware discussed how PRO profiles and profiles across specific diseases can be integrated and compared and how the content of disease-specific and generic QOL impact measures can be standardized across diseases to enable the first disease-specific aggregation of QOL impact across multiple chronic conditions and the first norm-based scoring of disease-specific measures for the chronically-ill population.  Case studies from early adoptions of these advances in academic medical center applications and clinical trials were discussed.

August 25th – 28th, 2013 | Montreal, Canada Including the patient’s voice in measuring risks and benefits was the topic of the plenary presentation by Dr. Ware and others at the 29th International Conference on Pharmacoepidemiology and Therapeutic Risk Management, Montreal Convention Center, Montreal, Canada on August 25th, 2013. The goal of the presentations was to present new initiatives to better understand the patient’s voice regarding the safety and effectiveness of pharmaceutical products in real world use. Dr. Ware opened the session with a presentation entitled “Improving Disease-specific and Generic Patient-reported Outcome (PRO) Measures to Better Capture the Beneficial and Adverse Effects of Pharmaceutical Therapies” in which a comprehensive endpoint model was applied to both validating PROs and evaluating treatment PRO benefits. Included was an example of the construct (convergent-discriminant) validation of the Quality of Life Disease Impact Scale (QDIS®), a new approach to standardizing both the content and scoring of the QOL impact attributed to specific conditions. More information can be found here.

October 24-27, 2012 | Budapest, Hungary Dr. Ware presented a paper entitled “Evaluation of a More Comprehensive Survey Item Bank for Standardizing Disease-Specific Impact Comparisons across Chronic Conditions”, at the ISOQOL Annual Conference. The paper presented a new Quality of Life Disease Impact Scale (QDIS®) developed by JWRG to fill the gap between widely-used disease-specific and generic patient-reported outcomes (PRO) measures. Preliminary evaluations of QDIS psychometric properties and empirical validity were reported. QDIS metrics standardized across conditions were shown to be sound psychometrically and valid. Combined with norm-based scoring and an integrated “dashboard” display, QDIS allows for easier interpretation of both disease-specific and generic health outcome measures. Tests of the usefulness of such combined information in clinical research and practice are warranted. In addition, Dr. Ware’s afternoon workshop at ISOQOL addressed “Integrating and Improving Generic and Disease-Specific Assessments.” Objectives included showing how both the content and scoring of disease-specific QOL impact measures can be standardized, how to evaluate improvements in QOL impact survey efficiency, and how reduced respondent burden can be achieved without sacrificing reliability and validity.