Is Quality of Life Important?

What is important to most patients with a chronic illness?  The typical answer is their overall quality of life.  They may not use those exact words but as anyone with a chronic disease knows, how well they are able to function and lead a normal life is what is valued most.  It is what a healthy individual takes for granted and what someone with a chronic disease fears will become a distant memory.  While this may seem obvious to patients, and acknowledged on a theoretical basis by physicians, in clinical practice the patient’s quality of life is not routinely tracked.  The purpose of BetterQOL.com is to bring these quality of life measurements to routine clinical practice. Physicians use various quality of life measurement scales in research studies.  Unfortunately, they cannot implement these scales in routine practice because of the following significant hurdles:

different diseases require different scales some scales require significant time to score an individual scale is not particularly meaningful but rather comparing the results of a patients scales over time in order to detect trends in quality of life is more meaningful accumulating scores over time without tracking treatment changes is not very useful to assist the physician and patient in choosing therapy Medication changes are easily tracked over time so patients and physicians have tangible data and can see how well the overall treatment plans are impacting the patient’s quality of life.