Advances in health status assessment. Overview of the conference.

Although the art and science of health status measurement have a considerable history that is in some ways as old as the healing arts themselves, interest and developments in this field have accelerated in the last two decades. To take advantage of this encouraging environment, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation sponsored its second conference on Advances in Health Status Assessment. It had two major goals: first, to let developers and potential users of health assessment tools explore further the conceptual and methodologic issues of particular concern to them; second, to highlight advances in applying these tools to clinical practice, clinical and biomedical research, and policy research. This monograph reports on the proceedings of that conference: three overviews and nine empirical reports in the above mentioned areas, one special report on health promotion, and four studies on particular methodologic issues: barriers to the use of health status assessment instruments; the advantages and limitations of generic and disease-specific measures; incorporating patient utilities into health status measures; and discounting. The conference highlighted both the considerable advances made in this field in the recent past and the numerous conceptual, methodologic, and practical problems yet to be resolved.