Quality of Life: Patient Reported Outcomes: Purpose, Types, Development, and Evaluation Part 1

I'm a research professor at the Duke Clinical Research Institute. And I've been doing patient-reported outcomes research for about 15 years or so. And I'm very happy to be invited to speak to you tonight about it. This is actually a great time to be talking about this because there are so many exciting developments in patient-centered research these days.

And so, we've got this lecture. And I think our -- the next lecture will also be about self-report approaches to research. So, I'd like to go over a few different things today. It's a huge, huge field, but I'll try to pick out what I think are some of the most basic issues that would be useful for everyone to know.

First of all, why measure patient-reported health status? What are the different types of patient-reported outcomes? When I say PROs, it's going to be patient-reported outcomes. How are patient-reported outcome measures developed and evaluated? Just very briefly, I want to go over that. We want to talk about some "new" methods for doing patient-reported outcomes research using item response theory.

And I put new in quotes because it's new for health measurement, but it's not new for measurement in general. Education testing folks have been doing this for a long time. So, we're a little late to the game, but there are some exciting developments. So, we want to mention those. And then finally, I want to say a word about interpreting scores that you'd get out of patient-reported

outcome measures. Okay? So, let's start with the first. Why measure patient-reported health status? Well, let's think very generally about a situation where we're interested in trying to measure the benefits of some intervention. And so, how do we assess benefit? If the intervention is the kind of intervention that's supposed to act on the body, it's a pill or some procedure, we've got all sorts of measures