Patient Reported Outcomes:  New Approaches Using Item Banks and Computerized Adaptive Assessments

Chairpersons:
A.George Awad, University of Toronto
Nina Schooler, Georgetown University & State University of New York

Speakers in the order of presentation:
William Riley, NIMH
David Victorson, North Western University, Evanston
Joel Weissman, MGH/Harvard Institute of Health Policy
Dennis Revicki, United BioSource, Maryland
Laurie Burke, FDA, Maryland
Robert Morlock, Biogen Idec

In his introduction, A. George Awad emphasized the important role of health outcomes in research and clinical practice.  Traditionally, health outcomes have been captured using scales that suffer from a variety of shortcomings, including:  questionable psychometric properties, lack of an underlying conceptual or theoretical construct, lack of sensitivity to small changes, lengthiness, cumbersomeness, poorly suited to address the realities of life for psychiatric patients and failure to capture the patients' perspective on their illness.  Further, the lack of standardized scoring metrics makes it difficult to compare data across various studies.  Looking forward, new methodologies based on contributions from item response theory (IRT), advances in computer technology that allow for computer-based assessment using computerized adaptive testing (CAT) may provide new approaches for more precise and individually tailored assessments of health status.