Measurement, Design, and Analysis Methods for Health Outcomes Research Course: Ware Lecture

September 24th-26th, 2018 | Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA

Dr. Ware will present 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 September 24-26 at the Harvard School of Public Health. The lecture will cover the 40-year evolution of survey content and noteworthy milestones in the history of conceptualizing patient-reported outcomes (PROs), as well as the most innovative and important methodological advances.  The latter include: applications of item response theory (IRT) and waves of development of very homogeneous item banks that require increasing the number of generic PRO scales; contrasting efforts to develop summary measures that each cover a wider range; new “super” short-form items that improve psychometric performance over legacy tools; and standardized IRT-based metrics common to new and legacy generic PROs.  A new generation of more valid and responsive disease-specific PROs will be discussed.  These new methods, which are standardized across diseases and norm-based, yield a summary score that fills the gap between disease-specific symptoms that are not QOL and generic QOL measures that are not disease-specific.  A new kind of adaptive survey logic that automatically adapts to the presence of multiple conditions will be discussed as a more practical solution to integrating disease-specific and generic measures into a common “dashboard” of PROs.