Health Status Measurment, Generic versus Condition-Specific Measures

Many measures of health status have been developed in the past decade for describing health outcomes and quantifying the changes. The term health status measure is often used interchangeably with other terms such as health measure, health-related quality of life, or quality-of-life measure even though the scope and definition of each term might not be the same. Health status measurement is defined as an instrument used to describe an individual's health state as defined by the descriptive system developed for each instrument.

Health status measurement can be classified into two main categories: generic measure and condition-specific measure. A generic measure is designed for use across a wide range of conditions, treatments, and populations. It is applicable to different subgroups in the general population or patient groups ...