John E. Ware Jr., PhD

Dr. Ware is an internationally recognized leader in health and quality of life (QOL) measurement and Professor at UMass Medical School (UMMS). He was Senior Research Psychologist for 15 years at RAND developing outcome measures for the Health Insurance Experiment followed by serving as Principal Investigator of the Medical Outcomes Study, which continued into a 12-year term as Senior Scientist at Tufts Medical Center. Prior to joining UMMS, he founded and led QualityMetric Incorporated for 10 years. Throughout his career, his goal has been to develop practical patient-reported measures that are useful in improving healthcare and, more recently, that meet regulatory requirements for monitoring outcomes. In addition to development of the SF-36 Health Survey, he led the IQOLA Project which spawned 100+ SF-36 translations. Currently he is applying modern psychometric methods to construct more actionable measures, including the first disease-specific QOL impact scale standardized across conditions and normed in a representative chronically-ill population. Dr. Ware has published 400+ peer-reviewed articles, was elected to the National Academy of Medicine, and has received multiple lifetime achievement awards.