Patient-Centered Item Selection for a New Preference-Based Generic Health Status Instrument: CS-Base

To develop patient-centered health content for a novel generic instrument (Château Santé Base [CS-Base]) that is suitable to generate values for health status.

Candidate items were drawn from existing health frameworks of generic health status instruments and placed in a diagram (HealthFAN^TM, Zeist, the Netherlands). Through an online survey, patients with a wide range of diseases were asked to select the 9 items that were most important to them. The importance of the items for the whole study group was determined by means of frequency distributions.

After handling duplicates and overlap, the remaining set of 47 items was placed in the HealthFAN. Among the 2256 Dutch patients who started the survey, the most common diagnoses were neck and back pain, diabetes, and asthma/chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The 5 health items mentioned most frequently as most important were pain, personal relationships, fatigue, memory, and vision. Hearing and vision, anxiety and depression, and independence and self-esteem seemed highly intertwined, so we chose to pair these items.

A total of 12 health items were included in CS-Base. Its content is largely based on patient input and enables classification of patients' health status. CS-Base can be administered by means of an app on a mobile phone, which makes it a convenient and attractive tool for patients and researchers.