Author Archives: John Ware

About John Ware

Dr. Ware is Professor Emeritus, Department of Public and Quantitative Health Sciences, UMass Chan Medical School. He studied psychology at Pepperdine University and psychometrics at Southern Illinois University. He is an internationally recognized and frequently cited developer and interpreter of patient reported outcomes (PROs) and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. His noteworthy activities over the past 50 years include: leading the development of PROs in the 5-year RAND Health Insurance Experiment; Principal Investigator for the 4-year quasi-experimental Medical Outcomes Study, for which he developed the SF-36 Health Survey; initiating and leading International Quality of Life Assessment Project SF-36 and SF-12 translations for clinical and population PRO research use worldwide; and founding NIH-sponsored small businesses among the first to apply “modern” psychometric methods to make generic and disease-specific PROs more efficient. His current work pursues the shortest possible (including single-item per domain/disease) comprehensive generic and disease-specific measures and their standardization and integration to make patient screening and outcomes monitoring more practical and useful.