Home  Publications 20 Years Special Edition Looking Backward, Looking Forward |
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Looking Backward, Looking Forward |
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Page 2 of 5 Like the Sickness Impact Profile (SIP), the SF-36 and other surveys from the Medical Outcomes Study (MOS) were constructed according to classical test theory;3,4 as noted below, the landmark transition to modern psychometrics came later.
Coincidentally, the International Quality of Life Assessment (IQOLA) Project was formally launched in 1991, the same year that the first issue of the PRO Newsletter was published. The IQOLA name was coined by Bernard Jambon, the Newsletter’s founder, during the inaugural meeting of the project. Subsequent PRO Newsletter articles in 1992 introduced the IQOLA Project, which was a public-private partnership sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry that included individuals and organizations from around the world, including the MAPI Research Institute in a major role coordinating IQOLA activities.5,6 Other early issues of the PRO Newsletter announced forthcoming publications of manuals prepared for early adopters of the MOS short-form surveys as well as www.sf-36.org, a website designed to serve the needs of PRO researchers and facilitate royaltyfree availability of MOS surveys.
From the perspective of 20 years later, it is striking how so much of what was first published in the PRO Newsletter grew far
beyond what could have been reasonably anticipated at that time. For example, the original eleven SF-36 translations became more than 100, and the dozens of randomized controlled trials using the SF-36 turned into thousands. The International Society for Health-Related Quality of Life (ISOQOL), announced in a 1993 issue of the PRO Newsletter, now is celebrating its 18th annual meeting in Denver in October 2011. In addition, the PRO Newsletter publicized the new ISOQOL journal Quality of Life Research, dozens of generic and disease-specific PRO instruments that became legacy measures, and the activities of numerous groups and organizations that have influenced PRO science and related regulatory affairs.
In reading through archive issues of the Newsletter, one is struck by how much has progressed in the PRO field, the challenges that remain to be addressed, and the key role that the PRO Newsletter has played in calling attention both to what has been and what needs to be accomplished. Thinking about what might lie ahead for the next 20 years, with the perspective of the past 20 years, brings to mind the baseball team manager Casey Stengel, who famously said: “Never make predictions, especially about the future.” With this reminder in mind, our comments below are as much thoughts about what the PRO field needs to do in the next twenty years as they are forecasts as to what that future may hold.
Clearly one much-needed transition is away from quantifying each health domain using the different metrics of different health surveys towards crosscalibrating the metrics underlying the domains, so that results can be meaningfully compared across health surveys. This process is somewhat analogous to the successful crosscalibrations in thermometry which standardized the metrics underlying various thermometers hundreds of years ago.
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