John E. Ware Jr. on health status and quality of life assessment and the next generation of outcomes measurement. Interview by Marcia Stevic and Katie Berry.

John E. Ware Jr. PhD, is a founder of QualityMetric. Inc., as well as its president and chief scientific officer. He also is executive director of the Health Assessment Lab at the Health Institute, New England Medical Center, and holds professorships at Harward University and at Tufts University School of Medicine. For 14 years, he was senior research psychologist at RAND, where he developed health status and patient satisfaction measures used in the Health Insurance Experiment. He also was principal investigator for the Medical Outcomes Study (MOS), which developed the SF-36 Health Survey and other tools widely used in monitoring patient outcomes. A coauthor of papers from the MOS that received the Association for Health Services Research (AHSR) Article of the Year Award in 1993, Dr. Ware has received numerous awards for work in the field of outcomes research. He now is principal investigator of the International Quality of Life Assessment Project, which is translating and validating the SF-36 Health Survey for use in 45 countries. Dr. Ware also is developing the next generation of patient-based assessments that use advances in computer technology to provide very brief measures, yet meet the standard of precision necessary for use on an individual patient basis.