A new section of the Living Textbook of Pragmatic Clinical Trials describes considerations for choosing patient-reported outcome measures in pragmatic clinical trials.

“Where possible, investigators are encouraged to use measures with adequate support for validity that are in the public domain,” the authors wrote.

The authors provide a set of questions to guide investigators in choosing appropriate measures. For example, investigators may want to understand whether the patient-reported outcome is in electronic health records, is in the public domain, and is valid for the use case in question.

The considerations were developed by members of the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory’s Patient-Centered Outcomes Core in collaboration with the Health Care Systems Interactions Core, the Electronic Health Records Core, and colleagues at the NIH.