Home  Publications 20 Years Special Edition Looking Backward, Looking Forward |
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Looking Backward, Looking Forward |
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Page 1 of 5 Looking Backward, Looking ForwardReflections on the 20th Anniversary of the PRO Newsletter | 
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Keywords: Patient-Reported Outcomes, Item Response Theory, Computer Adaptive Testing, SF-36, IQOLA
It does not seem possible that 20 years have passed since publication of the first issue of the PRO Newsletter, which is unique in its focus on patient-reported outcomes and its timely facilitation of commentary regarding progress in the field and editorializing about plans for the future. We welcome the opportunity of this noteworthy anniversary to look back and reflect on our PRO Newsletter contributions and the future of the PRO field.
The first issue of the PRO Newsletter in 1991 included the first publication about a new 36-item “Health Status Survey,” a year in advance of its more thorough documentation in the APHA journal Medical Care.1 That same PRO Newsletter issue included a front-page summary of Healthy People 2000, a U.S. initiative seeking to produce more
healthy years of life.2 The developers of the 36-item survey, also known as the SF-36® Health Survey, sought to standardize the metrics underlying frequently-measured generic health domains, so that results from very different applications such as the population health surveys that would be required for efforts like Healthy People 2000 could be compared with results from clinical trials and results for individual patients in everyday clinical practice. Healthy People 2000, like analogous international
efforts, had to first come to grips with measuring health in preparation for the information systems that would enable those seeking to manage health.
Reflecting a sense of pride and hope for the future, that first PRO Newsletter article about the SF-36 noted that it was already in use by 52 organizations and in dozens of clinical trials, which seemed like a lot at the time.
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