Health status information in clinical practice: the development and testing of patient profile reports.

As an initial step in a project to apply health status measures in routine clinical practice, we developed and tested patient profiles based on the Arthritis Impact Measurement Scales (AIMS) instrument. The health status profiles are single page summary reports of patient scores on the AIMS instrument whose reliability and validity were tested on a group of 123 rheumatologists and arthritis health professionals in clinical practice. Results demonstrated that the profile summary reports were reliable and valid when used by clinicians. These findings are important evidence for their eventual introduction into routine clinical practice.