Computerized Adaptive Assessment of Disease Impact

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This SBIR Phase II project will develop and evaluate a more practical and comprehensive approach to standardizing the self-assessment of disease-specific Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQOL) in the growing population of aging (45+ years) adults with, and at-risk of, co-morbid chronic conditions. Specifically, we propose to simplify disease impact screening (for prevention and early warning), and monitoring of HRQOL outcomes by adapting a consumer-focused Smart Measurement system, developed using item response theory (IRT) to improve outcomes measures, utilizing computerized adaptive testing (CAT) software to improve data capture and score estimation, and deliver content via the Internet. Phase I demonstrated administrative feasibility and supported the assumptions underlying the standardization of the content of disease-specific impact items and their calibration across diseases to achieve measures that are more responsive to outcomes as well as meaningfully comparable across diseases. Other complimentary SBIR projects focusing on single diseases have demonstrated the potential for more practical and precise assessments over a wide range of severity levels - and the possibility of eliminating ceiling and floor effects. In Phase II we will combine these efforts and expand our tests of standardized disease-specific and generic measurement models among larger samples of aging adults with multiple co-morbid conditions by administering items from new standardized disease specific item banks as well as previously-validated disease-specific and generic HRQOL measures to address the following aims: (1) Improve the instrument and item pools using (a) qualitative methods and expert/consumer evaluation, (b) quantitative studies among large samples of the most prevalent and burdensome chronic conditions (e.g., asthma, CHF, CKD, depression, diabetes, headache, obesity, osteoarthritis), and (c) head-to-head comparisons between more efficient static and dynamic short forms versus legacy (previously-validated) tools; (2) Develop and evaluate aggregated disease-specific and generic feedback report(s), suitable for consumers (who are and are not currently patients ) and their clinicians, with user-friendly normative/benchmark interpretive information; (3) Evaluate the self-assessment system in a longitudinal prospective panel study to replicate tests of psychometric properties, test predictive validity (medical expenditures, role/social participation, mortality) and responsiveness, and address data quality, context and mode effects, accessibility of the Internet, and effects of respondent characteristics; (4) Gather norms by administering generic and disease specific measures to representative US population samples with and without chronic conditions. The Phase II product will be a fully operational self-assessment system for screening and monitoring disease impact for the aging population with multiple co-morbid conditions, including: improved static and dynamic (CAT) short forms for assessing disease impact and generic health outcomes, user-friendly feedback reports and documentation. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The Disease Impact Assessment Tool will measure the impact of multiple co-morbidities across the spectrum of physical functioning and mental well-being. It will simplify disease burden screening and provide more actionable information for use in early warning and health care stratification, and enable more practical monitoring of health outcomes for use by providers, payors, governments, researchers and most importantly, consumers that encourage self-management and patient-centered care delivery.