RIMAS - Repository of Health Measurement and Evaluation Instruments

Overview

Project Summary

Over the last 40 years, a large number of instruments have been developed to measure health outcomes, namely health status or health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and assessment and satisfaction with care, and their use has grown in international research and clinical practice.

Measuring health outcomes is relevant for determining health gains in clinical trials or in economic evaluations of the effectiveness of treatment alternatives, monitoring disease management, determining the burden of disease and obtaining values of citizens' preferences about health status, for a better and more rational distribution of resources. In this era of international collaboration, there is a critical need to improve the interpretation of health outcome measures included in these studies and to confirm their international comparability and equivalence.

Thus, researchers from the Center for Health Studies and Research at the University of Coimbra (CEISUC) took the initiative to create RIMAS, a repository of health measurement and evaluation instruments, accessible to the entire user community. This repository contains information on health measurement instruments that are available in Portuguese, with a description of their main characteristics, the original and Portuguese versions, whenever possible, and how to use them by researchers, students and health professionals.

Main Goals

The main goals are dentify and describe instruments for measuring and evaluating health in order to:

• Guarantee the correct choice and use of these instruments;
• To support bibliographical research and research in student projects, theses and dissertations;
• Providing information to care providers and health researchers and helping to develop and strengthen collaborative relationships with other Schools and Research Centers;
• Enable a more extensive and systematic use of health outcome measures, validated and culturally adapted for the Portuguese language.

Project Details