The National Health Measurement Study

Principal Investigators: Dennis Fryback, Mari Palta
The past 35 years has seen significant progress in methodologies for health assessment using self-reported, preference-based summary measures of health-related quality-of-life (HRQoL) . Advances include a growing number of available indexes and the use of generic health outcome measures in clinical and cost-effectiveness studies creating a legacy of published data. We sought to obtain age-by-gender norms for older adults on 6 generic HRQoL indexes in a cross-sectional U.S. population survey and compare age-related trends in HRQoL. The EQ-5D, HUI2, HUI3, SF-36v2TM (used to compute SF-6D), QWB-SA and HALex were administered via telephone interview to each respondent in a national survey sample of 3,844 non-institutionalized adults aged 35-89. This has produced exceptionally rich data for health measurement researchers. A methodological component of the project aims to evaluate the performance of the HRQoL indexes in subgroups of the population, their relationship to each other and their measurement properties .

The full data set is now publicly available at http://www.disc.wisc.edu/NHMS/index.html. For a synopsis of research results and descriptions of allied research projects of the Health Measurement Research Group, a collaboration of faculty and students at UW, UCLA, and UCSD, see our web page at http://www.healthmeasurement.org/.