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Health Measurement Development and Interpretation

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Basic Methods Handbook for Clinical Orthopaedic Research

Abstract

Outcome measures help clinicians assess the risks and benefits of treatment in relation to a multi-faceted definition of health. While surrogate outcomes, including performance-based tests, provide important measures of health, patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) assess both specific and general factors of how a patient’s health affects their ability to participate in desired family and societal roles and activities. Clinicians electing to use measurement tools to evaluate patient progress, to inform decision-making, or for research purposes must understand the measurement properties of the instrument to select the most appropriate measure. An instrument with sufficient measurement properties will have demonstrated reliability, validity, and evidence of its ability to detect important change in the applicable population. For ease of communication, results should be presented using easily interpretable statistics that convey the clinical meaning of the results, including providing readers with a threshold with which to judge clinical importance and confidence intervals (CI) around within-group changes (if measuring pre- to post-intervention), around between-group differences (if comparing different interventions), and using summary measures such as number needed to treat (NNT). In this chapter, we will outline the purpose of different outcome measures, measurement properties, and methods of presenting the results to improve the broad communication of results.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fowler Kennedy Sport Medicine Clinic, 3M Centre, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

    Andrew Firth & Alan Getgood

  2. Faculty of Health Sciences, Elborn College, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

    Dianne Bryant

  3. Centre de medicine du sport et de l’exercice, Hirslanden Clinique La Colline, University Hospital of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

    Jacques Menetrey

Authors
  1. Andrew Firth
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  2. Dianne Bryant
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  3. Jacques Menetrey
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  4. Alan Getgood
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alan Getgood .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. UPMC Rooney Sports Complex, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Volker Musahl

  2. Department of Orthopaedics, Sahlgrenska Academy, Gothenburg University, Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Jón Karlsson

  3. Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and Traumatology, Kantonsspital Baselland (Bruderholz, Laufen und Liestal), Bruderholz, Switzerland

    Michael T. Hirschmann

  4. McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada

    Olufemi R. Ayeni

  5. Hospital for Special Surgery, New York, NY, USA

    Robert G. Marx

  6. Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, NorthShore University HealthSystem, Evanston, IL, USA

    Jason L. Koh

  7. Institute for Medical Science in Sports, Osaka Health Science University, Osaka, Japan

    Norimasa Nakamura

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Firth, A., Bryant, D., Menetrey, J., Getgood, A. (2019). Health Measurement Development and Interpretation. In: Musahl, V., et al. Basic Methods Handbook for Clinical Orthopaedic Research. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-58254-1_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-58254-1_13

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-58253-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-58254-1

  • eBook Packages: MedicineMedicine (R0)

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