News

WORCESTER, MA, August 10, 2015 – Results from an article published in Health and Quality of Life Outcomes link a new smoking-specific quality of life measure based on JWRG’s QOL Disease Impact Scale (QDIS®) to smoking behavior and to smoking-specific symptoms. This article presented data from two independent studies: a German trial and a US general population survey. Like many others, these studies both focused on young and otherwise healthy current and former adult smokers. Both studies found that the QDIS smoking impact scale had stronger associations than the generic SF-36® Health Survey with smoking status (current versus former) and the number of cigarettes smoked per day. In the German trial, which also included laboratory test results, the QDIS smoking impact measure also correlated substantially and significantly higher than the SF-36 with four clinical biomarkers of tobacco exposure and impact. These and other results showed that the German- and English-language QDIS smoking impact scale and other measures in JWRG’s Tobacco QOL Impact Test (TQOLITv1™) have comparable and satisfactory psychometric properties for use in smoking outcomes research, including studies of otherwise healthy smokers. Additional information about the German trial design and results were published in Nicotine & Tobacco Research. JWRG gratefully acknowledges unrestricted research grant support from British American Tobacco, Group Research & Development, to evaluate the psychometric properties of TQOLITv1 measures among current and former smokers.

WORCESTER, MA, April 27, 2015 – A new quality of life instrument, the Tobacco Quality of Life Impact Tool (TQOLIT™), developed by the John Ware Research Group, was proven to be useful in a 6-month clinical trial of the effects of switching smokers to a reduced toxicant prototype cigarette. Like many smoking studies, this trial focused on young and otherwise healthy adult current and former smokers for whom reliable measurement throughout the range of functional health and well-being is critical.  The results were recently published in Nicotine & Tobacco Research. Measuring the health-related quality of life (HRQOL) of young and middle-aged smokers is challenging because many of the impacts of smoking are not apparent for decades. In addition, prior to QDIS there was no brief HRQOL scale that measured the impact of smoking on physical, emotional and social aspects of life. TQOLIT integrates several JWRG advances in patient-reported outcomes (PRO) measurement to address these challenges. First, TQOLIT includes a short 7-item scale that measures the impact of smoking on quality of life. The TQOLIT smoking impact measure is a smoking-specific version of JWRG’s QOL Disease Impact Scale (QDIS®), which is a comprehensive disease-specific PRO measure that is standardized across 35 chronic conditions. For TQOLIT, QDIS was adapted to ask about limitations in HRQOL specifically attributed to smoking. For example, one question asks how often smoking limited everyday activities over the past four weeks, while another question asks how often smoking led to worrying about health now or in the future. […]

WORCESTER, MA, February 10, 2015 – A national registry recently conducted a field test to collect patient-reported outcomes (PRO) data using a new method.  Patients logged on from home or the clinic to complete the survey, as is typical for web-based assessments, before and after total joint replacement (TJR).  The difference was in what happened next.  The survey used the Quality of Life (QOL) Information System (QOLIX®) which uses a powerful new adaptive survey logic (ASLX®) to automatically adapt to the presence of multiple comorbid conditions while also estimating outcomes with metrics equivalent to those underlying widely-used legacy PROs.  Although each of the major elements of QOLIX, including standardized disease-specific (QDIS®) and generic (QGEN®) modules, and the power of ASLX had been evaluated successfully in real data simulations, this was the first real-world test of the entire system in an ongoing PRO registry.  Despite collecting more comprehensive and more individualized information, QOLIX surveys were faster in the TJR field test for most patients in comparison with state-of-the-art PRO surveys that were administered in parallel. The Function and Outcomes Research for Comparative Effectiveness in TJR (FORCE-TJR) registry is sponsored by AHRQ and led by a team of researchers at UMass Medical School in cooperation with a national network of surgeons.  FORCE-TJR goes beyond traditional approaches to comparative effectiveness research (CER) that are based on retrospective analyses of rates of implant failure or revision.  The FORCE-TJR model is patient-centered, more comprehensive, and integrates population-based sampling and prospective monitoring of functional health and […]

WORCESTER, MA, January 29, 2015 — JWRG’s pursuit of disease-specific QOL measurement innovation appears to be on the right track toward filling the gap between disease-specific measures that do not measure QOL and QOL measures that are not disease-specific.   Studies conducted during the development of the Quality of Life Disease Impact Scale (QDIS®) showed that it differs from widely-used disease-specific measures in a number of important ways.  First, QDIS increases disease-specific QOL content representation enough to be on a par with widely-used generic QOL measures. At the same time, QDIS provides a single overall QOL impact score, despite its breadth of content.  While QDIS item content overlaps substantially with the item content of generic measures, because QDIS items are disease-specific, QDIS consistently achieves greater convergent and discriminant validity in comparison with generic measures. QDIS also is the first disease-specific measure to be scored using norm-based scoring, based on a representative sample of the entire U.S. chronically ill general population, as opposed to a single disease.  This advance in standardized scoring is based on evaluation of crucial assumptions about IRT item parameters used in scoring disease-specific QOL impact across diseases that were made during the development of QDIS.  Due to its standardization of content and scoring across diseases, QDIS also is the first disease-specific measure that allows comparisons of disease-specific outcomes across diseases. Nina Deng and her UMass Medical School (UMMS) and JWRG collaborators tested assumptions underlying standardized scoring of QDIS, including differential item functioning (DIF) and other psychometric properties […]

WORCESTER, MA, May 30, 2014.   The Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ) announced the award of a grant to Dr. John Ware and researchers he leads at UMass Medical School and JWRG to break new ground by taking a previous measurement advance into a new direction. An innovative computerized measurement advance, the Quality of Life Disease Impact Scale (QDIS®), makes it much easier to gather individualized information from patients who have multiple chronic conditions. QDIS was developed by JWRG to rapidly and reliably determine how much each individual chronic condition a patient has and all comorbid conditions combined affect what they are able to do, how they feel and their overall quality of life (QOL). The ultimate goal is to better quantify patient “voices” to better understand how to improve the outcomes of their care. The R&D project uses a large national database already collected by JWRG for representative samples of chronically-ill US adults. The information it contains is unique because it is the first to standardize both the content and scoring of disease-specific QOL measures to capture patient reported health and QOL outcomes.  QDIS is also the first norm-based scoring of disease-specific QOL impact across multiple conditions.  The breakthrough that made the national database possible was JWRG’s new Internet-based system that automatically adapts self-administered surveys to measure the impact of multiple diseases. AHRQ peer reviewers noted many significant strengths of the new UMass-JWRG R&D project, including a strong investigative team of highly productive researchers, a scientifically rigorous approach […]