Incorporating individualized quality of life measures in the evaluation of pharmacy services: the IN*COMPASS framework.

Quality of life is a fascinating field to researchers and practitioners alike. To some researchers, quality of life is of interest because it offers untold challenges in constructing instruments and capturing data necessary to answer key questions about health, disease, and treatment. For such researchers, quality of life is about statistical relationships among questions and about using questions to define the physical, social, and emotional domains of health. To other researchers, this field is about finding practical applications in policy and treatment decision making for the information provided by quality of life assessments. To these researchers, the focus of quality of life is on ways to apply knowledge of quality of life differences between groups with and without specific diseases or ways to use knowledge about how treatments affect the quality of life of various patient populations. To practitioners, quality of life is about treatment outcomes that impact individual patients' daily lives. It is the practitioner that Funderburk, Pleil, and Pathak are considering in their paper in this issue of Pharmacy Practice Management Quarterly. These authors give several important messages to practitioners seeking to serve their patients by incorporating quality of life into their practices. The key message in the paper is that to better understand and determine the impact of treatment on a patient's quality of life, it is critical to start with a baseline or reference point relevant to that patient. From that baseline or reference point, treatment decisions can be made and progress, in quality of life terms, can be evaluated. Critical questions in their framework, which is called the IN*COMPASS (Individualized Client Oriented Method for Preferred Alleviation of Sickness States) Approach, are "How are you now?" and "How would you like to be?" The authors do not endorse particular quality of life tools in their approach; rather they prescribe certain critical questions that must be answered if information captured by any quality of life tool is to be useful at the patient level. Readers should not be put off by the fancy acronym used in this paper; nor must readers be keen students of quality of life to appreciate its message. The IN*COMPASS approach is fundamental to good patient care and can be applied by practitioners with any level of understanding of and appreciation for quality of life assessments.