Eastern Canada Health Outcomes Meeting:
Advances and Challenges in Using Quality of Life
(QOL) and Other Patient-Reported Outcomes (PROs)
The term “Health Outcomes” embraces all outcomes of health events or health
encounters from death and disease through to disability, quality of life,
dissatisfactrion and cost. Lately there has been a heightened interest in understanding how to measure outcomes that can only be reported upon by the person – termed PROs. The growth in PRO interest was spurred by the drug regulating industry requiring new drugs to include evidence for the impact on outcomes that matter to the patient and most of these outcomes can only be reported on by the person themselves, rather than being directly measured. PROs encompass symptoms, functions including physical, emotional, psychological and social functions, health perception, health-related quality of life (HRQL) and quality of life (QOL).
Something for everyone : A conference targeting students, clinicians,
academics, industry, emerging and experienced researchers.
The challenge today in using PROs is to be able to choose among
hundreds
of measures and interpret the results with respect to classical
and modern
psychometric theory and to longitudinal change.
Attendees will learn:
Different PRO/QOL theories
Strengths and weaknesses of existing and new measures
Novel applications including response shift evaluation
Optimal statistical approaches to longitudinal data such as ordinal
regression, growth curves, trajectories, structural equation
modeling, and Rasch analysis.
