Measuring health status and quality of life in disease management programs

Current medical practice is largely disease and problem focused, concentrating on the diagnosis and treatment of anatomic or physiologic problems. This approach assumes that physiologic parameters accurately reflect the patient’s status of health. It also assumes that, when a patient’s disease is ameliorated, his or her quality of life will improve. Many health services researchers find these parameters to be imperfect determinates for good outcomes of patients’ perceived health status. However, there are many valid and reliable methods to measure patients’ health status and quality of life. Recently available survey tools that measure quality of life are based on modern psychometric techniques. Disease management programs should take advantage of these valid and reliable tools to measure outcomes of their patients and assess the quality of their programs.