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 […]

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 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.