Development and evaluation of the Basic Outcome Measure Protocol for Aphasia (BOMPA).

Area of Science:

• Speech-language pathology
• Neurology
• Rehabilitation medicine

Background:

• Aphasia significantly impacts quality of life and communication.
• Clinicians require efficient tools for assessing aphasia severity and functional communication.
• Existing outcome measures may not always meet the needs of time-pressed clinicians.

Purpose of the Study:

• To describe the development of the Basic Outcome Measure Protocol for Aphasia (BOMPA).
• To evaluate the inter-rater reliability of the BOMPA tool.
• To assess BOMPA's utility for measuring quality of life and conversational participation in individuals with aphasia.

Main Methods:

• A fully crossed design was employed for the inter-rater reliability study.
• Twenty speech-language pathologists independently rated 12 videos of individuals with aphasia.
• Ratings were compared between participants and with an expert rater's gold standard.

Main Results:

• Inter-rater reliability among participant speech-language pathologists ranged from 0.65 to 0.96.
• Reliability comparing participant ratings to the expert gold standard ranged from 0.59 to 0.86.
• These results indicate moderate to strong reliability for the BOMPA tool.

Conclusions:

• The Basic Outcome Measure Protocol for Aphasia (BOMPA) demonstrates good to excellent inter-rater reliability.
• BOMPA is a practical and potentially useful outcome measurement tool for clinicians.
• The tool facilitates quick self-report on quality of life and clinical evaluation of aphasia severity and conversational ability.