The world of PROMs is full of acronyms. This blog expands on 3 of the industry’s big ones.
ICHOM
International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement
ICHOM defines “standard sets” of outcome measures (including PROMs) to enable meaningful comparisons and learning. Where “cross walks” exist, more than one measure may be offered.
Global healthcare leaders confer to define the “standard sets” which include case mix variables (such as age, gender, weight), PROMs, measurement tools, data sources and time points for data collection.
ICHOM aims to transform healthcare systems worldwide and drive value based care by measuring and reporting outcome measures in a standardised way.
COSMIN
COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health Measurement INstruments
COSMIN is an international multidisciplinary team of health professionals and researchers with experience in the development and evaluation of health measurement instruments. The initiative aims to improve the selection of such instruments.
COSMIN has developed a checklist and user manual to guide researchers in their methodological assessment of health measurement instruments, particularly PROMs.
Their mission – “to promote, perform, support, and disseminate high quality systematic reviews of measurement instruments, to enable evidence-based instrument selection.”
PROMIS
Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System
PROMIS is an extensive set of self-reported measures of global, physical, mental, and social health for adults and children in the general population and those living with a chronic condition.
PROMIS is developing the PROsetta Stone – attempting to link various scores measuring the same health outcome eg PROMIS with SF-36 in order to make valid comparisons between research studies and increase the utility of the PROMIS collection of measures.
PROMIS offers many of its surveys for free, with some premium user-pays options for computerised adaptive testing, iPad apps and institutional users.
