Quality Measures Used to Assess Care, Improve Outcomes in Children, Adults with Rheumatic Diseases

“PROMIS measures may be good instruments to assess patient reported outcomes in both clinical and research settings for rheumatoid arthritis patients,” said Ms. Wohlfahrt, adding that “further research is needed to determine minimally clinically important differences in these measures for RA patients.”

In another presentation on the use of PROMIS measures in rheumatology, Shanthini Kasturi, MD, a rheumatologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery, New York, presented data from a study that assessed the validity and reliability of PROMIS Global 10 for measuring global physical and mental health in adult patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE).

In the study, 204 adults with SLE were recruited from an SLE Center of Excellence to participate in the study. The study cohort was racially, ethnically and socioeconomically diverse, with most patients identifying themselves as nonwhite and over one-quarter identifying themselves as Hispanic or Latino. Over one-third of the patients were covered by Medicaid. All patients completed the PROMIS Global 10, select PROMIS CATs, as well as the SF-36 and LupusQoL-US measures. Kasturi and colleagues then compared the PROMIS Global 10 scores with those obtained from PROMIS CATs and legacy instruments.

According to Dr. Kasturi, the study is the first to show that collecting PROMIS Global 10 information from a large and diverse group of SLE patients is feasible and that the test is valid and reliable when compared with other legacy SLE patient-reported outcome measures.

“This study is an important first step in demonstrating the potential of the PROMIS Global 10 for the routine measurement of patient-centered outcomes in clinical rheumatology,” said Dr. Kasturi, adding that more studies are needed to evaluate the responsiveness of this test to changes in SLE disease activity as well as to its validity for use in other rheumatic diseases.

Mary Beth Nierengarten is a writer, editor and journalist with over 25 years of medical communications experience.