Assessing Health and Quality of Life Outcomes in Dialysis

A special report on an Institute of Medicine Workshop assessing health and quality-of-life outcomes in dialysis. The conclusion of the workshop was that there was no one best quality-of-life instrument. However, the workshop agreed that a number of valid instruments exist and others are being developed. Priority should go to gaining experience using these instruments in the clinical setting, acquiring enough data to interpret quality-of-life scale scored differences in a consistent way, and beginning the correlation of quality-of-life data with clinical outcome measures. The challenge to the end-stage renal disease (ESRD) community is to reach consensus quickly on measurable, quantifiable process and outcome measures that operationally define quality of care and that will allow ESRD providers to show that high value truly comes from high quality of care.