Guideline for Systematic Reviews of Outcome Measurement Instruments
Methodology to help you prepare, select, evaluate, interpret and report on studies in your systematic review of outcome measurement instruments.
Methodology to help you prepare, select, evaluate, interpret and report on studies in your systematic review of outcome measurement instruments.Systematic reviews of outcome measurement instruments are important tools for selecting the most suitable instrument to measure a construct of interest in a specific study population. High quality systematic reviews can provide a comprehensive overview of the quality (i.e. measurement properties) of instruments and supports evidence-based recommendations for the selection of the most suitable instrument for a given purpose (i.e. research or clinical practice; or discriminative, evaluative or predictive applications).
Systematic reviews of outcome measurement instruments differ from reviews of interventions and diagnostic test accuracy studies and are complex. In fact, multiple reviews (i.e. one review per measurement property) are included in a review of one or more measurement instruments.
The COSMIN methodology is developed specifically for patient-reported outcomes (PROMs), and is now adapted for use in systematic reviews of other types of outcome measurement instruments, such as clinician-reported outcome measures (ClinROMs), performance-based outcome measures (PerFOMs), and laboratory values.
10-step procedure for conducting a systematic review on PROMs
We developed a consecutive ten-step procedure for conducting a systematic review specifically for patient-reported outcome measures. Steps 1-4 concern preparing and performing the literature search, and selecting relevant studies. Steps 5-8 concern the evaluation of the quality of the eligible studies, the measurement properties, and the interpretability and feasibility aspects. Steps 9 and 10 concern formulating recommendations and reporting the systematic review.
To help you conducting a systematic review of PROMs, we developed several tools for you to use
A comprehensive user manual is written on how to conduct these ten steps in a systematic review of PROMs. In step 5 the content validity of an PROM is determined. As this is a very important and complex step to take, we wrote a separate user manual for assessing content validity of PROMs.
Additional tools to download:
Translated versions:
Conducting a systematic review on ClinROMs, PerFOMs, and laboratory values
When you are conducting a systematic review on for ClinROMs, PerFOMs, and laboratory values, we recommend you to replace the boxes on reliability and measurement error of the COSMIN Risk of Bias checklist to the COSMIN Risk of Bias tool to assess the quality of studies on reliability and measurement error. In the accompanying User manual we describe how to use the tool, and conduct such a review.
When you are conducting a systematic review including both PROMs and ClinROMs, PerFOMs, and laboratory values, we recommend you to follow the instructions given in the User manual of the COSMIN Risk of Bias tool to assess the quality of studies on reliability and measurement error.
We developed a consecutive eleven-step procedure for conducting a systematic review specifically for ClinROMs, PerFOMs, and laboratory values. Steps 1-4 concern preparing and performing the literature search, and selecting relevant studies. Steps 5 concerns the data extraction. In the step 6-9 the measurement properties are assessed. Steps 10 and 11 concern formulating recommendations and reporting the systematic review.
To help you conducting a systematic review of ClinROMs, PerFOMs and laboratory values
A comprehensive user manual is written on how to conduct these eleven steps in a systematic review any outcome measurement instrument, i.e. PROMs, ClinROMs, PerFOMs, and laboratory values.