Wasting time hunting down QOL Scales – "Painful,"
Immediate access to clinical instruments – "Priceless. . ."
The success of quality of life and patient outcome studies depends a great deal on the choice of appropriate measures, but the increasing number of outcome and QOL tools can make this decision difficult and time consuming.
ProQolid is a database designed to facilitate the selection of appropriate instruments for clinical research. It was developed by the Mapi Research Institute in Lyon, France, a company with 15 years of experience in linguistic validation, including the translation of more than 400 questionnaires into 110 languages.
The first level of access to ProQolid is free and contains 14 categories of basic information, such as author, objective, and language. A second level provides additional in-depth information, including validity, reliability, and scoring data, as well as translations. This "advanced access" is restricted to database subscribers, now including the NIH community.
Over 75 new instruments are added annually and highlighted on the ProQolid website.
ProQolid organizes validated instruments by name, author, disease, and population. The database search engine allows categories to be combined in order to pinpoint and retrieve instruments most relevant to research.
Major pharmaceutical companies, non-profit organizations, government agencies, universities, and individual researchers and students worldwide subscribe to ProQolid, and the database is routinely visited by over 800 users per day. The value of ProQolid is well described by one of our own NIH researchers:
"The challenge for us researchers is finding out information about outcome measures of relevance to our research areas of interest; learning about their testing, use, and applications; and ultimately, locating the actual measure. Clearly ProQolid's advanced access feature is a resource that incorporates all of this information, with links to the original publications and the actual outcome measures. I strongly believe that it’s going to be a well-utilized resource for many of us at the NIH, across all institutes, centers, and health care disciplines. Many thanks for providing us with access to this valuable resource." (Dawn Wallerstedt, RN, CRNP, Research Nurse Practitioner, Division of Intramural Research, NCCAM)
To access ProQolid, go to the Databases webpage of the NIH Library website.
We invite you to give ProQolid a test run and get back to us with your comments and questions. For assistance and to submit your feedback, contact Mary Ryan, Biomedical Librarian/Informationist, NIH Library (ryanm@mail.nih.gov, 301-451-5861).