Speaker Luncheon
HPSS’s speaker luncheon is always a high point. This year, Ruth Etzioni, a professor of biostatistics and health services at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, will give a talk titled “Statistician at the Policy Table: Integrating Modeling in the Development of Public Health Guidelines” on August 4 from 12:30 p.m. – 1:50 p.m.

A key product of evidence-based medicine is the publication of national policies for disease control, providing guidance to clinicians and the public about options for prevention, screening, diagnosis, and treatment. Policy development generally takes the form of a group decisionmaking process, in which an interdisciplinary panel of subject-area experts integrates many studies of diverse quality and attempts to make intelligent inferences from imperfect and incomplete evidence. Etzioni will relate her experiences as a statistician on two national guidelines panels for the early detection of prostate cancer, argue that statisticians can play a critical role as members of policy panels, and provide a vision for and an example of how to use modeling to aid panel members as they weigh the quantitative tradeoffs of competing public health policies.

Etzioni has been modeling cancer interventions and outcomes for more than 15 years. She models prostate cancer for the Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network, which aims to quantify the contributions of screening and treatment changes to declines in prostate cancer mortality. Her prostate cancer models have been used to estimate the frequency of overdiagnosis, determine whether PSA screening could have caused the early downturn in prostate cancer mortality, and compare different screening intervals and biopsy referral strategies. Through her membership on national prostate cancer policy panels, she is working to integrate modeling directly into the policy-development process.

August 3, 7:00 a.m. – 8:15 a.m.
Development and Psychometric Evaluation of the PROMIS Item Banks and Short-Form Instruments, led by Laura Lee Johnson of the National Institutes of Health
In late 2004, the National Institutes of Health formed the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) cooperative network. One of the primary goals of PROMIS is to develop health-related quality-of-life item banks, which would be a valuable resource for the clinical research investigative community. This roundtable will provide an overview of the development of the item banks and psychometric evaluation processes, as well as an update on the current status of PROMIS. Based on attendees’ interests and backgrounds, topics of discussion may include item response theory, differential item functioning, standardizing the score metric, literature reviews, collection and use of qualitative data, mode and environment of administration, and how to use a patient-reported outcome measure in clinical research and practice.

August 4, 7:00 a.m. – 8:15 a.m.
Reliability and Misclassification in Physician Profiling, led by John L. Adams of RAND Corporation
There is growing interest in physician report cards to inform consumer choice and support pay-for-performance incentive systems. Physicians are being profiled on both cost and quality of care, but the reliability of these profiles has not been adequately explored. We will discuss the interaction between the statistical and policy issues in physician profiling. Among the topics we will cover are the reliability and misclassification risks of various systems.

Visit the online program for up-to-date session times and locations.