Rheumatoid Arthritis Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Rheumatoid Arthritis, including details on treatment, symptoms, causes, medication.

Performance of health status measures with a pen based personal digital assistant.

Kvien TK, Mowinckel P, Heiberg T, Dammann KL, Dale Ø, Aanerud GJ, Alme TN, Uhlig T

Department of Rheumatology, Diakonhjemmet Hospital, Oslo, Norway. t.k.kvien@medisin.uio.no

BACKGROUND: Increasing use of self reported health status in clinical practice and research, as well as patient appreciation of monitoring fluctuations of health over time, suggest a need for more frequent collection of data. Electronic use of health status measures in the follow up of patients is a possible way to achieve this. OBJECTIVE: To compare self reported health status measures in a personal digital assistant (PDA) version and a paper/pencil version for test-retest reliability, agreement between scores, and feasibility. METHODS: 30 patients with stable rheumatoid arthritis (mean age 61.6 years, range 49.8 to 70.0; mean disease duration, 16.7 years; 63% female; 67% rheumatoid factor positive; 46.6% on disease modifying antirheumatic drugs) completed self reported health status measures (pain, fatigue, and global health on visual analogue scales (VAS), rheumatoid arthritis disease activity index, modified health assessment questionnaire, SF-36) in a conventional paper based questionnaire version and on a PDA (HP iPAQ, model h5450). Completion was repeated after five to seven days. RESULTS: Test-retest reliability was similar, as evaluated by the Bland-Altman approach, the coefficient of variation, and intraclass correlation coefficients. The scores showed acceptable agreement, but with a slight tendency to higher scores on VAS with the PDA than the paper/pencil version. No significant differences were seen for measures of feasibility (time to complete, satisfaction score), but 65.5% preferred PDA, 20.7% preferred paper, and 13.8% had no preference. CONCLUSIONS: The clinimetric performance of paper/pencil versions of self reported health status measures was similar to an electronic version, using an inexpensive PDA.

Published 15 September 2005 in Ann Rheum Dis, 64(10): 1480-4.
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