Measuring Health From a Broad Perspective: Preferences Assessed Among Various Professional Stakeholder Groups

OBJECTIVES:

Measurement of health by means of patient-reported outcome measure instruments (OMIs) is performed by different professional stakeholders such as healthcare providers, policy makers and researchers. While health is increasingly considered from a broad perspective, common instruments do not appear to suffice in measuring such broad concepts. Instrument development would benefit from an analysis of stakeholder preferences regarding health measurement. This study aimed to identify the properties of new tools to measure broad health concepts as desired by different professional stakeholder groups.

METHODS:

A survey was conducted to assess preferences of three stakeholder groups: researchers, medical professionals and professionals in policy and governance.

RESULTS:

The preferred target group and way of score weighting seemed to follow sector lines, but otherwise no clear differences in preferences between stakeholder groups were found. Strikingly, individual respondents even often indicated various preferences, reflecting their different measurement purposes. There was consensus among the involved stakeholders on new opportunities of OMIs regarding the desirability of the incorporation of modern technologies such as apps and wearables, the need for patient and citizen input in topic selection and the desirability of combining quantitative and qualitative outcome measurement.

CONCLUSIONS:

Our study revealed that preferences in measuring health were not tied strictly to stakeholder groups but that even within individual respondents various preferences exist. This means a certain flexibility of new OMIs may be appropriate. Opportunities are offered by modern technologies, incorporating patient and citizen input, and partly qualitative outcomes.