Should We Trust Patient-Reported Outcomes?

How Much Should We Trust

Most papers that employ Differences-in-Differences estimation (DD) use many years of data and focus on serially correlated outcomes but ignore that the resulting standard errors are inconsistent. To illustrate the severity of this issue, we randomly generate placebo laws in state-level data on female wages from the Current Population Survey. For each law, we use OLS to compute the DD estimate o...

Patient-Reported Outcomes, Patient-Reported Information

Internet communication is developing. Social networking sites enable patients to publish and receive communications very easily. Many stakeholders, including patients, are using these media to find new ways to make sense of diseases, to find and discuss treatments, and to give support to patients and their caregivers. We argue for a new definition of patient-reported information (PRI), which di...

Can We Trust Test Outcomes?

Software development is an on-going process. To ensure that the changes made do not break previous functionality, a regression test suite is maintained along with the source code. The correctness and the side effects of code changes are judged based on the output of the tests. However, are these tests’ outcomes always correct? Does a test failure imply a bug and do all tests passing imply a bug...

Patient-reported Outcomes

Key points Many gastrointestinal diseases are symptomdriven, so the patient’s perspective is particularly important in this area. Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) provide essential information that objective measures and clinician assessment may fail to capture. PROs can be measured in a scientific, reliable, and valid manner. Generic, disease-specific and treatmentspecific PRO instruments exis...

Patient reported outcomes for rheumatoid arthritis: where are we and where are we going?