The success of the Apgar score demonstrates the astounding power of an appropriate clinical instrument. This down-to-earth book provides practical advice, underpinned by theoretical principles, on developing and evaluating measurement instruments in all fields of medicine. It equips you to choose the most appropriate instrument for specific purposes. The book covers measurement theories, methods and criteria for evaluating and selecting instruments. It provides methods to assess measurement properties, such as reliability, validity and responsiveness, and interpret the results. Worked examples and end-of-chapter assignments use real data and well-known instruments to build your skills at implementation and interpretation through hands-on analysis of real-life cases. All data and solutions are available online. This is a perfect course book for students and a perfect companion for professionals/researchers in the medical and health sciences who care about the quality and meaning of the measurements they perform.

A new edition of this practical guide for clinicians who are developing tools to measure subjective states, attitudes, or non-tangible outcomes in their patients, suitable for those who have no knowledge of statistics.

Technology is changing how we practice medicine. Sensors and wearables are getting smaller and cheaper, and algorithms are becoming powerful enough to predict medical outcomes. Yet despite rapid advances, healthcare lags behind other industries in truly putting these technologies to use. A major barrier is the cross-disciplinary approach required to create digital tools, a process that requires knowledge from many people across a range of fields. 'Fast Facts: Digital Medicine – Measurement' aims to overcome that barrier, introducing the reader to core concepts and terms and facilitating dialogue. Contrasting 'clinical research' with routine 'clinical care', this short colorful book describes types of digital measurement and how to use and validate digital measures in different settings. And with the burgeoning development of digital medicine tools, the authors provide a timely overview of the security, ethical, regulatory and legal issues to be considered before a product can enter the market. Table of Contents: • What is digital medicine? • Where does digital medicine fit? • Regulatory considerations • Ethical principles and our responsibilities • Ethics in practice • Security, data rights and governance • Digital biomarkers and clinical outcomes • Measurement in clinical trials • Verification and validation • The future of digital medicine

Health literacy-the ability for individuals to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services to facilitate appropriate health decisions-is increasingly recognized as an important facet of health care and health outcomes. Although research on health literacy has grown tremendously in the past decade, there is no widely agreed-upon framework for health literacy as a determinant of health outcomes. Most instruments focus on assessing an individual's health literacy, yet the scope of health literacy reaches far beyond an individual's skills and abilities. Health literacy occurs in the context of the health care system, and therefore measures of health literacy must also assess the demands and complexities of the health care systems with which patients interact. For example, measures are needed to determine how well the system has been organized so that it can be navigated by individuals with different levels of health literacy and how well health organizations are doing at making health information understandable and actionable. To examine what is known about measures of health literacy, the Institute of Medicine convened a workshop. The workshop, summarized in this volume, reviews the current status of measures of health literacy, including those used in the health care setting; discusses possible surrogate measures that might be used to assess health literacy; and explores ways in which health literacy measures can be used to assess patient-centered approaches to care.

Measurement and interpretation of key ultrasound parameters are essential to differentiate normal anatomy from pathology. By using Measurement in Ultrasound, trainee radiologists and ultrasonographers can gain an appreciation of such measurements, while practitioners can use it as a valuable reference in the clinical setting. The book follows a consistent format throughout for ease of reference and features useful information on preparation and positioning of the patient for ultrasound, the type of transducer and method to be used, the appearance of the resulting ultrasound images and the measurements to be derived from them. Designed for frequent use in everyday practice, the book includes more than 150 high-quality ultrasound images annotated with key measurements and accompanied by concise explanatory text. Normal variants are provided, along with ranges for features that can change during development and in disease. This new edition covers relevant developments in ultrasound. Where appropriate, updated ultrasound measurements that have arisen are also included and key references are provided as an aid to further study.

Designated a Doody's Core Title! "This is a valuable resource for readers seeking basic to advanced information on measurement. It should be on the bookshelf of all researchers, and a requirement for graduate nursing students."Score: 100, 5 stars--Doody's Medical Reviews "...this book is a wonderful shelf reference for nurse researcher mentors and investigators who may need to explore content or use content to design, test, select, and evaluate instruments and methods used in measuring nurse concepts and outcomes."--Clinical Nurse Specialist This fourth edition presents everything nurses and health researchers need to know about designing, testing, selecting, and evaluating instruments and methods for measuring in nursing. Thoroughly updated, this fourth edition now contains only the latest, most cutting-edge measurement instruments that have direct applicability for nurses and health researchers in a variety of roles, including students, clinicians, educators, researchers, administrators, and consultants. Using clear and accessible language, the authors explain in detail, and illustrate by example, how to conduct sound measurement practices that have been adequately tested for reliability and validity. This edition is enriched with topics on the leading edge of nursing and health care research, such as measurement in the digital world, biomedical instrumentation, new clinical data collection methods, and methods for measuring quality of care. Key features: Provides new and emerging strategies for testing the validity of specific measures Discusses computer-based testing: the use of Internet research and data collection Investigates methods for measuring physiological variables using biomedical instrumentation Includes information on measurement practices in clinical research, focusing on clinical data collection methods, such as clinimetrics Identifies the challenges of measuring quality of care and how to address them

There are not enough resources in health care systems around the world to fund all technically feasible and potentially beneficial health care interventions. Difficult choices have to be made, and economic evaluation offers a systematic and transparent process for informing such choices. A key component of economic evaluation is how to value the benefits of health care in a way that permits comparison between health care interventions, such as through costs per quality-adjusted life years (QALY). Measuring and Valuing Health Benefits for Economic Evaluation examines the measurement and valuation of health benefits, reviews the explosion of theoretical and empirical work in the field, and explores an area of research that continues to be a major source of debate. It addresses the key questions in the field including: the definition of health, the techniques of valuation, who should provide the values, techniques for modelling health state values, the appropriateness of tools in children and vulnerable groups, cross cultural issues, and the problem of choosing the right instrument. This new edition contains updated empirical examples and practical applications, which help to clarify the readers understanding of real world contexts. It features a glossary containing the common terms used by practitioners, and has been updated to cover new measures of health and wellbeing, such as ICECAP, ASCOT and AQOL. It takes into account new research into the social weighting of a QALY, the rising use of ordinal valuation techniques, use of the internet to collect data, and the use of health state utility values in cost effectiveness models. This is an ideal resource for anyone wishing to gain a specialised understanding of health benefit measurement in economic evaluation, especially those working in the fields of health economics, public sector economics, pharmacoeconomics, health services research, public health, and quality of life research.

Radiology though being restricted to only analyzing images, carries a greater depth to it in encompassing all the forms and fields of medicine from embryology, pathology to treatment and its response. The importance of radiology in the present set-up is very high and no patient work-up is complete without a radiological investigation. Quantitative and qualitative perspectives have always been the two sides of a coin in radiology. Both have been synergistic to each other in not only identifying the lesion, characterizing it but also in guiding effective planning of management, its execution and follow-up. The role of measurements so plays a more integral part at all these levels. Measurements also provide a distinct sense of accuracy and specificity in aiding diagnosis. The experience of taking various measurements in radiology during my postgraduate days made me realize the need for handbook in simple, concise, tabular and diagrammatic format to facilitate the easy and fast reporting of various cases by radiologists. Data contained in this book is compiled from various standard radiology textbooks (refer Bibliography), journals and Internet over the years since my postgraduate days, this will be companion to standard textbooks.

The importance of measurements for the proper assessment of human locomotion is increasingly being recognized. The fields of application encompass both healthy and pathological locomotion as encountered in rehabilitation medicine, orthopedics, kinesiology, sports medicine, and the like. Measurement of Human Locomotion provides an up-to-date des

Medicine deals with treatments that work often but not always, so treatment success must be based on probability. Statistical methods lift medical research from the anecdotal to measured levels of probability. This book presents the common statistical methods used in 90% of medical research, along with the underlying basics, in two parts: a textbook section for use by students in health care training programs, e.g., medical schools or residency training, and a reference section for use by practicing clinicians in reading medical literature and performing their own research. The book does not require a significant level of mathematical knowledge and couches the methods in multiple examples drawn from clinical medicine, giving it applicable context. Easy-to-follow format incorporates medical examples, step-by-step methods, and check yourself exercises Two-part design features course material and a professional reference section Chapter summaries provide a review of formulas, method algorithms, and check lists Companion site links to statistical databases that can be downloaded and used to perform the exercises from the book and practice statistical methods New in this Edition: New chapters on: multifactor tests on means of continuous data, equivalence testing, and advanced methods New topics include: trial randomization, treatment ethics in medical research, imputation of missing data, and making evidence-based medical decisions Updated database coverage and additional exercises Expanded coverage of numbers needed to treat and to benefit, and regression analysis including stepwise regression and Cox regression Thorough discussion on required sample size