Donald L. Patrick

Dr. Patrick works on the assessment of health status and quality of life in application to adolescents, chronic illness and disability, health promotion, evaluation research, poverty and underserved populations, and dying and death. He was an original developer of the Quality of Well-Being Scale and Perceived Quality of Live Scale. He heads US Field Centre for the WHO Quality of Life Studies, and has developed cross-cultural measures for genital herpes, migraine, urinary incontinence, irritable bowel syndrome, male erectile dysfunction, common cold, and obesity. Dr. Patrick has conducted several cost-effectiveness studies in evaluation of health promotion. He studies chronic illness and disability from many perspectives. He directs the Youth Quality of Life Group [www.yqol.org] and co-directs the End of Life Care Research Group [http://depts.washington.edu/eolcare/] Dr. Patrick is currently developing a generic QOL measure for adolescents with modules specific to public health surveillance and youth with facial differences. He is also working on measures of family experience of youth with chronic illness and the development of outcome measures for evaluating the quality of dying and death.

In 2005 Dr. Patrick published a book with Dr. Rick Deyo on how treatments become standards of practice with or without an evidence base. He teaches Outcomes Research in Health and Medicine at the UW.

Member, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Director, Youth Quality of Life Group
Co-Director, End of Life Care Research Group
Senior Investigator, Center for Disability Policy and Research
Inaugural President, International Society for Qualityof Life Research
1995, Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences

How technology gets adopted without evidence
The social determinants of self-reported health and quality of life
Community-level interventions for reducing obesity
Regulation of drugs and devices using outcomes research
Measures of population health
Meta-analyses and literature synthesis of outcomes measures
Environmental indicators of community participation of people with disabilities
Applications of modern test theory to outcome measures
Epidemiology of disablement

Outcome measurement for drugs and devices is high-profile activity. Dr. Patrick has done considerable research in the U.S. and Europe on the use of these outcomes measures in new drug and device approval and in the evaluation of promotional claims and reimbursement. His outcomes research also involves economics and his research crosses the fields of economics and psychology.