Building on the work started in this research program’s corollary project— Health Measurement in Patients: Tracking Clinical Outcomes—we will evaluate differences in medical outcome assessments among patients when they are asked to complete the same measures by different methods. In this project we will supplement the baseline data collected in the corollary project by conducting approximately 600 telephone interviews of the same patients enrolled in the corollary project. The information from these telephone interviews will be compared to parallel data collected from the self-administered health measurement tools distributed by mail survey.

The key purposes of this study are: (1) to compare the findings of each health measure for the 6-month outcome period when they are self-administered (the mailed surveys) vs. interviewer-administered (the telephone surveys); and (2) to review and evaluate issues of readability for the self-administered versions.

The results of this study will provide important information about the comparability of health measure information collected by different methods. The study will also provide information about the readability of these widely-used health measures to help assess their appropriateness for use with individuals of lower education.

This study is being directed by researchers in the Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Data collection is being conducted by the Health Outcomes Assessment Program at the University of California, San Diego. Data management and analysis is being coordinated by researchers in the Department of Population Health Sciences at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.