News

June 9th – 10th, 2016 | Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, California Dr. Ware participated in the 2-day celebration of the 40th anniversary of the RAND Health Insurance Experiment (HIE), the largest health policy study in U.S. history. He reunited with his colleagues on the HIE research team and others at RAND’s Santa Monica headquarters for discussions about how this landmark study has changed the health policy landscape over the last few decades.

October 16, 2014 | Berlin, Germany International investigators who have been comparing health survey items with and without health attribution for more than 10 years teamed together and presented their findings at a special plenary session on Cutting Edge Research at the 21st Annual Conference of the International Society for Quality of Life Research (ISOQOL) in Berlin, Germany on October 16, 2014. This ISOQOL session highlighted high quality research from members of the ISOQOL community. The research team (Jakob Bjorner, Janine Devine, Barbara Gandek, Matthias Rose, Mark Kosinski, and John Ware) presented results from studies of a representative sample of US adults (N=900) who completed sets of questions about role functioning which differed in attribution (no attribution or attribution to health, physical health, or emotional health) but were otherwise identical in content. For example, some standard measures, such as the SF-36 Role Physical and Role Emotional subscales, use items with health attribution (e.g., “… have you had any of the following problems with your work or other regular daily activities as a result of your physical health?”). Other measures, such as the PROMIS Ability to Participate in Social Roles and Activities items, do not use health attribution (e.g., ‘I have trouble doing all of my usual work (include work at home)”). The team found that the prevalence of limitations in role participation was greater for items without health attribution. The practical implications of these differences, were apparent in tests of validity in discriminating between clinical groups, which favored items with […]

August 17th – 19th, 2015 | 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 17-19 at the Harvard School of Public Health. The lecture covered noteworthy milestones in the history of patient-reported outcomes (PRO) as well as some of the most innovative and important recent conceptual and methodological advances.  The latter included a new generation of standardized (both content and scoring) disease-specific PROs that fill the gap between widely-used disease-specific measures 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?”  Dr. Ware discussed how both the content and scoring of disease-specific QOL impact measures can be standardized across diseases and how norm-based scoring of disease-specific measures can be accomplished in the chronically-ill population.  The recently-published QOL Disease-Specific Impact Scale (QDIS®) was used to illustrate how the convergent and discriminant validity of disease-specific QOL impact ratings is being tested among adults with multiple comorbid conditions (MCC) in an ongoing NIH/AHRQ-sponsored study.  A second case study from an ongoing national registry will focus on a powerful new adaptive survey logic that automatically adapts to the presence of  MCC while also estimating outcomes equivalent to the metrics underlying widely-used legacy PROs without administering the latter.  Despite the more comprehensive information collected in this small-sample field test,  surveys […]

October 10th, 2013 | Worcester, MA Dr. Ware lectured on "The Impact of Health Care: Quantifying the Voice of the Patient," one of four presentations during the Albert Sherman Center Inaugural Scientific Symposium at the UMass Medical School on October 10th, 2013. Other speakers included Joseph Goldstein and Michael Brown (University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center) who summarized their Nobel Prize winning discoveries in 2-part lectures entitled: "A Century of Cholesterol and Coronaries." Robert Langer (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) lectured on "Controlled Drug Delivery and Tissue Engineering for Angiogenesis Inhibitors." Dr. Ware demonstrated advances in psychometric methods and Internet-based surveys that are fundamental to understanding patient functioning and well-being outcomes in clinical research and practice.

November 3-7, 2012 | Berlin, Germany This presentation entitled “Standardizing the Metric and Increasing the Efficiency of Physical Functioning Outcomes Measurement” demonstrated that improved adaptive survey logic (ASLX®) combined with improved physical functioning survey items can achieve the following improvements: a standardized scale that maintains backward comparability with legacy generic physical functioning measures; reductions in respondent burden of 50% in comparison with routine CAT surveys; reduced percentage scoring at the highest score level (ceiling); and improved range over which reliable measurement can be achieved, including for those with mild impairment. The presentation was made by Dr. Rick Guyer of JWRG on Tuesday, November 6th at the ISPOR 15th Annual European Congress.