PROMIS

PROMIS, or the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System, is a set of measures developed by the National Institutes of Health to assess patient-reported health status. It was created to standardize the assessment of physical, mental, and social health across diverse populations and conditions, enabling comparability across studies and settings.

PROMIS uses calibrated item banks and modern psychometrics, including item response theory, to support computer adaptive testing and short-form questionnaires. This approach reduces respondent burden while maintaining precision. Item banks cover a wide range of domains, including physical function, pain (interference and intensity), fatigue, sleep disturbance, emotional distress (depression and anxiety), social functioning, and social roles, among others. Each domain can be measured with full banks or shorter forms, and scores are translated into T-scores referenced to the U.S. general population, typically with a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 10.

The measures are designed for use in adults and, for many domains, children as well. They have been validated in numerous populations and translated into multiple languages, with ongoing cross-cultural adaptation to support international use. PROMIS instruments are widely employed in clinical trials, observational studies, and routine clinical care, including integration into electronic health records and outcome monitoring. Data from PROMIS measures support comparisons across studies and over time, facilitate meta-analyses, and help track treatment effects and disease impact from the patient perspective.

Access to PROMIS item banks and scoring tools is provided through NIH-supported platforms, and the measures are generally available for research and clinical use, with documentation on psychometric properties and validity.