Results Summary and Professional Abstract
| This project's final research report is expected to be available by August 2020. |
Peer-Review Summary
Peer review of PCORI-funded research helps make sure the report presents complete, balanced, and useful information about the research. It also assesses how the project addressed PCORI’s Methodology Standards. During peer review, experts read a draft report of the research and provide comments about the report. These experts may include a scientist focused on the research topic, a specialist in research methods, a patient or caregiver, and a healthcare professional. These reviewers cannot have conflicts of interest with the study.
The peer reviewers point out where the draft report may need revision. For example, they may suggest ways to improve descriptions of the conduct of the study or to clarify the connection between results and conclusions. Sometimes, awardees revise their draft reports twice or more to address all of the reviewers’ comments.
Peer reviewers commented and the researchers made changes or provided responses. Those comments and responses included the following:
- The reviewers had questions about the literature review that was used to collect patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs). Specifically, reviewers expressed concern about whether the literature review was comprehensive and suggested that there could have been bias in the guidelines identified. The researchers said they reviewed literature from a wide variety of fields, including medicine, psychology, and sociology. They said they believed it was unlikely that their search was biased because it was so extensive. The researchers offered a supplementary file listing the thousands of citations found in their searches.
- The reviewers said the literature search may have missed many important documents because of the terminology used or omitted in the searches. The reviewers questioned the value of the consensus generated in this project compared with existing guidelines that experts in psychometrics have developed. The researchers said they included many psychometricians among the experts who reviewed the collected PROMs. The researchers said they did use old terminology in their literature review but said these terms were important to use since they are still used frequently in the literature. The researchers added that their goal was not to develop a framework for the field of psychometrics but to organize reporting guidelines for patient outcomes.
- The reviewers said that the report was not sufficiently detailed about how the researchers developed their list of items that need to be reported in studies of PROMs. The researchers added more details of their stepped process to identify items first by examining key resources providing reporting guidelines, then completing a literature review to determine whether there were other items that need to be reported for PROMs studies but were not listed in those key resources. The researchers also added tables with the final list of general reporting expectations for any study testing the properties of PROMs, and the final list of expectations specific to each of the nine PROMs measurement properties.
Conflict of Interest Disclosures
The COI disclosure form will be posted here soon.
Project Details
