Commentary: Online Platform of Minimal Important Difference estimates for patient reported outcomes: potential and challenges

Abstract

Carrasco-Labra et al. [ [1] Carrasco-Labra A, Devji T, Qasim A, Phillips MR, Wang Y, Johnston BC, et al. Minimal important difference estimates for patient-reported outcomes: a systematic survey. J Clin Epidemiol (in press). Google Scholar ] are to be congratulated for opening the door to more useful and useable information resulting from reviews of outcome measurement instruments. Rather than existing in the files of the authors, and reported in an article, they have moved the findings from a thorough review of the literature onto an online, searchable database of 5,324 minimally important difference (MID) values extracted for 526 instruments from 585 studies. At a minimum, they have just saved researchers, clinicians and policy makers needing estimates of MIDs countless hours of work finding these often elusive values within the literature and leaving the work of finding that data to people skilled in systematic reviews of available evidence. MID values are challenging to find. A less than thorough search may identify only some of the studies, or mistakenly lead people to settle on the first value found. However, MIDs play an important role in clinical trial planning, so all potentially relevant evidence should be brought to bear on the final decision. Sharing this information on an online platform will make clinical research more efficient to do, and more interpretable in policymaking and clinical care. This idea of developing interactive repositories of measurement study results with key data extracted from each study to enable its use is valuable in and of itself. But this article also provides the high-level results of this review.