Journal of clinical epidemiology
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This article presents the current state of patient-reported outcome measures and explains new opportunities for leveraging the recent adoption of electronic health records to expand the application of patient-reported outcomes in both clinical care and comparative effectiveness research. ⋯ The science of patient-reported outcome measurement has matured sufficiently to be integrated routinely into electronic health records and other electronic health solutions to collect data on an ongoing basis for clinical care and comparative effectiveness research. Further efforts and ideally coordinated efforts from various stakeholders are needed to refine the details of the proposed framework for standardization.
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Examining covariate balance is the prescribed method for determining the degree to which propensity score methods should be successful at reducing bias. This study assessed the performance of various balance measures, including a proposed balance measure based on the prognostic score (similar to a disease risk score), to determine which balance measures best correlate with bias in the treatment effect estimate. ⋯ Researchers should consider using prognostic score-based balance measures for assessing the performance of propensity score methods for reducing bias in nonexperimental studies.
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Comparative Study
Impact of immortal person-time and time scale in comparative effectiveness research for medical devices: a case for implantable cardioverter-defibrillators.
To assess the extent of immortal time bias in estimating the clinical effectiveness of implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) and the impact of methods of handling immortal time bias. ⋯ Immortal time bias was detected in the ICD clinical effectiveness study, which might have led to substantial bias overestimating the treatment effect if handled by exclusion. When an appropriate landmark was selected, that method yielded similar hazard ratios to those obtained by the Mantel-Byar method, supporting the validity of the landmark method.