Performance of health status measures with a pen based personal digital assistant.
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Date
2005-09-15
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Abstract
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