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Agency for Healthcare Research and
Quality Using QualityMetric's SF-12v2™ Health Survey
QualityMetric Releases Significant
Update of SF Bibliography
QualityMetric Releases
SF-12v2™ Health Survey User's Manual
QualityMetric Streamlines Access
to Health Outcomes Surveys
Ware Receives Donabedian Award
from ISPOR
Modern Psychometric Methods
"Score" at the Winter Olympics
SF Survey Licensing and User
Registration Simplified and On-line
Recipes for Health Measures and
Gingerbread Cookies
Scholars Debate Interpretation
of SF-36® Summary Health Measures
Can item response theory
reduce respondent burden in health assessments?
Japanese SF-36 User's
Manual Published by Fukuhara
The SF-36 Physical and
Mental Health Summary Scales: A Manual for Users - Just Published
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SF-36® User's Manual Foreword June 29, 2001, Lincoln, RI The health care information technology (HCIT) revolution around the world involves more than just new linkages between clinical and economic databases, computers and the Internet. The HCIT revolution includes major advances in the conceptualization of health status and improvements in measurement tools. Advances in the "tools" for measuring health status include standardized questionnaires that quantify the burden of disease and the benefits of specific treatments in the terms that matter most to the consumers of health care. These tools include "generic" measures of health status that are not specific to any one disease or treatment group. Generic measures make it possible to compare the burden of different diseases and the benefits of different treatments, using scientifically sound measures of patient functioning - what people are able to do - and measures of distress and well-being - how people feel. These concepts and others make up health-related quality of life (HR-QOL). The new and improved tools of measurement are much more practical to use and are easier to understand and interpret. Thus, these tools make it possible to listen to the "voice" of the consumer when decisions are made about the best ways to organize and deliver health care. Measurement tools - such as the SF-36® Health Survey - that were first used for purposes of research are now being applied to real world situations. Within the United States, for example, the SF-36 is being used by a federal agency - the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) - responsible for the health care of the elderly population, to monitor and compare health outcomes for hundreds of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries nationwide. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which approves new drugs and other treatments, uses the SF-36 and other generic measures to evaluate the efficacy of those treatments and inform the content of advertisements presented to the public. Health status measures also are becoming widely adopted by patient advocacy organizations, such as the Foundation for Accountability (FACCT), and by health care accrediting organizations, such as the National Committee on Quality Assurance (NCQA) and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO). In this manual, Shunichi Fukuhara, MD and his colleagues present the only version of the SF-36® Health Survey authorized for use in Japan, along with the information necessary for its proper administration, scoring and interpretation. This manual is the product of many years of research and many publications in the scientific literature. It is comprehensive in its focus, including information about the translation and adaptation of the SF-36® for use in Japan; psychometric studies of the assumptions underlying the construction of scales and summary measures; and algorithms for scoring the Japanese SF-36®. The manual also documents the reliability and validity of the Japanese SF-36® and presents normative data from general population surveys from all regions of Japan. These studies have yielded among the most complete datasets and highest levels of data quality observed among international studies of the SF-36® Health Survey. The information presented in this manual will contribute greatly to the proper use and interpretation of the Japanese SF-36®. The team in Japan, headed by Dr. Shunichi Fukuhara, has also contributed substantially to the work of the International Quality of Life Assessment (IQOLA) Project, which is translating and adapting the SF-36® Health Survey for use in more than 40 countries. Because of the efforts of the IQOLA Project investigators, the SF-36® Health Survey has become the most widely-used health status measure in the world. The Japanese team was the first to identify and publish differences in the factor structure of the SF-36®, based on comparisons between psychometric and clinical studies of validity in Japan and the U.S. Their work has led to new efforts to develop an improved and more generalizable conceptual framework for measuring health status in international studies. With the publication of this manual, the information necessary for the proper use and interpretation of the Japanese SF-36® is documented for the first time in a single source, making the SF-36® more available than ever before to researchers, clinicians, and policymakers. We congratulate Dr. Fukuhara and his colleagues for their many accomplishments and especially for their latest contribution - this manual documenting the Japanese SF-36® Health Survey. We hope that it will prove to be very useful for measuring and improving health in Japan. John E. Ware, Jr., Ph.D. Barbara Gandek, M.S. |
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