Abstract

For more than a decade, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has supported the development of the Patient Reported Outcomes Information System (PROMIS^®) Roadmap initiative (www.nihpromis.org). This effort reflects the growing importance of and interest in the use of measures of patients’ self-reported health status in medical and health care research, as well as in clinical practice. The goal of the NIH initiative is to support the development of a large bank of items for measuring patient-reported outcomes (PROs), which, ultimately, could be assembled into measurement scales for use in both clinical and research settings. With NIH support the PROMIS^® development initiative has been able to make both the items and the scales available to clinicians and researchers (Cella et al., 2007).