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

September 18-25, 2023 | Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA

Dr. Ware will present his annual lecture entitled “State of the Art of Methods for Health Outcomes Measurement and Evaluation  – I” during the September 16-23 course at the  Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA.

The lecture will cover the 40-year evolution of survey content and noteworthy conceptual and methodological milestones in the history of improving patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs).  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. 

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