QualityMetric
Imagine a world where you can predict and better understand your risk of being afflicted with a chronic illness or disease without a clinical visit or being poked and prodded. Now imagine knowing all of that after filling out a short survey.
Lincoln-based QualityMetric's patient-reported outcome (PRO) surveys are more than just simple surveys; they are scientifically-precise surveys developed by a sophisticated team of measurement scientists. But to the patients/consumers who take the surveys, they are a non-threatening, accurate measurement of their health status.
QualityMetric's innovative surveys allow the patient's opinion to come through in a uniform, standardized, and statistical survey that makes analyzing the patient easier and more informative. PRO surveys capture reliable and scientifically valid data from the component of medicine that matters the most — the patient.
"I was impressed by the depth and quality of QualityMetric's products," says Dianne Ritter, Sector Lead for Life Sciences and Healthcare at the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation. "I quickly realized that they were addressing an unmet need in the health care arena."
As healthcare attempts to focus more on treating the whole patient and increasing patient satisfaction and quality of life, QualityMetric has entered as the foremost solution to providing key pieces of information that are essential to patient health and treatment.
Since its inception in 1997 by healthcare PRO guru Dr. John Ware, QualityMetric's FDA-accepted health surveys have measured overall general (generic) health as well as specific diseases. "These surveys bring the consumer's voice into the equation by measuring quality of life including physical functioning and mental well-being," says Jeff Hallowell, Vice President, Business Development.
QualityMetric licenses all its surveys for academic, commercial and government use and offers an array of additional services including educational and training programs through presentations and webinars, consulting services for customized PRO strategies and various modes of survey administration.
"For patients, to be able to verbalize, in a quantitative and qualitative manner, their opinion of medical procedures and/ or drugs is revolutionary," says Ritter. "Quality Metric's surveys provide a voice in health care management that has not always been able to be heard so clearly."
The science behind the development of PRO surveys is called psychometrics, basically the measurement of human characteristics. QualityMetric employs a group of psychometrics measurement scientists at its Lincoln location, including Ware. The scientists and analysts use proprietary analytic methodologies to create and report on the surveys currently in use by QualityMetric.
QualityMetric's Generic Health Surveys are designed to recognize 44 disease conditions and are available for use in more than 70 languages. Accepted by the Food and Drug Administration, QualityMetric's surveys have been also documented in more than 7,500 articles and publications and administered to millions of people worldwide.
Some of the surveys can also be used to help manage healthcare effectively in the long run by predicting expenditures for insurance companies with information from an individual patient as well as a general population. QualityMetric's surveys can also provide the initial assessment of a patient's health status and evaluate treatment effectiveness.
QualityMetric's scientists are currently launching the first computerized adaptive disease-specific surveys, Dynamic Computer Adaptive Surveys or DYHNA®. Catering to all major diseases, the surveys measure patients' overall health status and how likely the patient is to get a certain disease. DYNHA® combines the brevity of a short form survey with the accuracy of a longer form, with 80 to 90 percent reduction of respondent burden in questions.
"These questions change depending on how each person answers the previous question," says Hallowell. "This is a timely, cost-efficient way to measure overall health regarding diseases over time."
Indeed all of QualityMetric's surveys are intended to be a non-invasive, cost-efficient, patient-friendly and accurate way of measuring healthcare and risks. QualityMetric is now working on how to administer their tools to the masses in innovative, easily accessible ways via paper, PDA tablets and also by making the surveys interactive with television.
"There really are no other companies that have the intellectual property that QualityMetric has," says Hallowell. "We are the gold standard in health outcomes surveys — locally, nationally and globally."