This special section introduces the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS®) [
1] 16-item Profile (PROMIS-16). The motivation for its development was to provide a brief multiple-scale option suitable for assessing patients in clinical care and for researchers needing a parsimonious health-related quality of life (HRQoL) measure. Many researchers and clinicians want to include PROMIS measures in their battery of assessments but have limited bandwidth for additional items. This has led to uptake of the 10-item PROMIS Global-10 [
2], a measure that yields global mental and physical HRQoL summary scores, but no domain-level information, which limits its usefulness. In contrast, the PROMIS-16 assesses eight HRQoL domains: physical function, cognitive function, ability to participate in social roles, pain interference, fatigue, sleep disturbance, depression, and anxiety. Like other PROMIS Profile measures, one can also estimate the physical and mental HRQoL summary scores from the PROMIS-16. Its inclusion of the cognitive function domain makes it possible to calculate the PROPr preference-based score for use in economic evaluations [
3]. …