COSMIN conducting a systematic review of outcome measurement instruments

COSMIN guidelines to help you conduct a systematic review of PROMs. Go to http://www.cosmin.com for the manual, the tools and more information! Suppose you’re designing a trial and you want to measure the severity of pain, depression, or physical functioning from the patient’s perspective.Then you need to decide which outcome measurement instrument is most suitable. A patient-reported outcome measure, or PROM is often a questionnaire filled out by the patient. Selecting a high-quality PROM is a crucial part in the study design phase of your trial. If the PROM you choose is of poor quality: the conclusions from your research might not be valid, they can lead to wrong interpretations or even harmful medical decisions. This is a waste of resources and unethical.So how do you select the most suitable PROM for your construct and population? A systematic review of PROMs is a great way to find the right instrument. This review helps you to: find all available PROMs, evaluate their quality, and decide which is the most reliable and valid PROM for your research. If a high-quality review is not available, you can conduct a systematic review yourself. With the recommendation from your review you can help the entire field to standardize instrument selection and do better research. We’ve created a manual to help researchers through the process of conducting a systematic review. We are COSMIN, a multidisciplinary group of researchers in the field of medicine. We have developed a methodology to improve the selection of outcome measurement instruments. As a part of this we evaluate the quality aspects: the measurement properties of the instrument. Watch the video to see all the 8 steps in our methodology. You can find the manual and all COSMIN tools on our website http://www.cosmin.nl.