SeleQT Platform

Explanation

Health definition is complex and multidimensional, and based on individual well-being that can be described in a population using perceived health indicators. The interest for these indicators has been growing when promoting health related quality of life became of greater concern than stretching lifespan. The use of such outcomes led researchers to choose specific instruments to assess perceived health, namely patient reported outcomes measurement scales (PROMS).

During the last decades, the growing development of PROMS and the challenges faced when they had to be culturally adapted made the choice of the right PROMS harder and harder. Before using a PROMS, a researcher first has to make sure that this PROMS meets requirements of high psychometric validity, and then has to check for the PROMS terms of use and availability, and eventually has to get the right scoring algorithms.

The SeleQT platform rose from the need of researchers developing PROMS to let the scientific community get an open access to their products. The whole scientific community assessing latent traits (health related quality of life, satisfaction, therapeutic alliance …) in populations could benefit from these PROMS.

PROMS are ususally developed in a language, and then translated or culturally adapted in other languages by researchers. The wide use of such PROMS warrants a better quality of measurement of the latent traits of interest, and their comparability at an international level. External validity of researches using such PROMS should be enhanced.

The SeleQT platform provides researchers with PROMS and tools, i.e. Epidata entry forms, short scoring manuals, SAS® (SAS Institute, Inc, Cary, NC, USA) macros to compute scores, facilitating their use.