Research Roundup from the Research Committee

With the expectations of accountability by consumers and third party payors for the efficacy of physical therapy practice, there has been a significant increase in the push to develop outcome measures in rehabilitation. One type of these measures, patient-reported outcome measures (PROs), are becoming increasingly more common in clinical practice. The American Physical Therapy Association’s Guide to Physical Therapist Practice 3rd edition includes outcomes assessment as an integral part of the Patient and Client Management model, and delineates that appropriate tests and measures depend upon established psychometric properties of the measurement.1 The Section on Research formed the Evidence Database to Guide Effectiveness (EDGE) Task Force in 2006 to encourage the Sections to evaluate and catalog the best outcome measures related to their respective areas of clinical practice. The Oncology EDGE Task Force has been focusing on this call and during the past 3 years this information has been disseminated at the Combined Sections Meetings and has resulted in several journal publications. With this increased emphasis in PROs, it is important to understand the framework of psychometric evaluation and how to implement PROs appropriately in a clinical setting