A systematic review: how to choose appropriate health-related quality of life (HRQOL) measures in routine general practice?

ABSTRACT

In more recent times, health-related quality of life (HRQOL) measurements have formed an important part of assessing the quality of routine care in general practice. For a measure to have clinical usefulness it must not only be valid, appropriate, reliable, responsive, and capable of being interpreted, but it must also be simple, fast to complete, easy to score, and provide useful clinical data. The Two-step method of choosing appropriate measures is introduced. Then through comparison of generic instruments with disease-specific instruments, we can conclude that sometimes a combination of generic and disease-specific HRQOL measures may be more appropriate for monitoring changes in a patient's health status due to an intervention.