Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #107962

Dagmar Amtmann, PhD, Kurt L. Johnson, PhD, CRC, and Carrie M. Kuehn, MA, MPH. Rehabilitation Medicine, University of Washington, Box 356490, Seattle, WA 98195, 206-543-3677, kjohnson@u.washington.edu

Clinical measures of disease status do not adequately capture how chronic diseases and disabilities affect individuals' day-to-day functioning. Availability of psychometrically sound scales for measuring patient reported outcomes facilitates the process of developing research protocols for clinical trials, pooling of data for meta-analyses, and multicenter research. Modern measurement approaches can help to address many psychometric and substantive issues, such as comparing results from different studies that used different instruments, creating valid and reliable short forms of questionnaires, investigating biases (cultural, gender, or related to disability) and exposing poorly functioning items and questionable constructs. University of Washington Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes in Research (UWCORR) is one of 6 NIH funded primary research centers in a national network called Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS). UWCORR's efforts are focused on increasing the availability of a psychometrically validated, dynamic system to measure pain and fatigue in children and adults with a broad range of disabilities and health conditions. Pain and fatigue have been shown to significantly affect well-being and other measures of quality of life. Examples of applications of modern psychometric methods to improving existing measures of pain and fatigue will be presented and the relevance of this project to improving quality of life in populations with chronic disease and disability will be discussed. UWCORR would like to engage public health communities in identifying important public health research questions that could benefit from improving of existing or developing of new measures of patient reported outcomes.

Learning Objectives:

• Discuss the importance of using psychometrically sound outcomes measures for clinical practice and research.
• Describe how modern measurement approaches improve our ability to develop valid and reliable outcome measures.
• Discuss how measures of pain and fatigue for populations with chronic disease and disabilities can be improved.

Keywords: Outcome Measures,

Related Web page: uwcorr.washington.edu

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.

Recorded presentation