PROMIS Global-10
PROMIS Global-10 overview
Creator and Context
The PROMIS Global-10 is a 10 item measure of overall physical and mental health, developed under the National Institutes of Health PROMIS initiative.
It was developed by Ron Hays, Jakob Bjorner, Dennis Revicki, Karen Spritzer and David Cella, and published in 2009. It is one of the most widely used generic health related quality of life measures in the world.
PROMIS measures are publicly available without licence, fee or royalty for individual research and clinical use. Software applications that embed PROMIS sit under a separate arrangement.
Presenting Conditions
The Global-10 produces two summary scores:
Global Physical Health, covering physical health, everyday physical activities, pain and fatigue
Global Mental Health, covering quality of life, mental health, satisfaction with social activities and emotional problems
Administration
Self administered in one to two minutes. Most items are framed as in general, with no time frame. The pain, fatigue and emotional problems items use a 7 day recall window. The pain item is a 0 to 10 numeric rating, recoded for scoring.
Desired Audience
Adults aged 18 and over, in general population and clinical settings, across virtually every disease area.
Ten items give you a physical and a mental health score that can be compared against the general population and against every other condition, because the metric is common. For anyone reporting to a funder who buys health across the board rather than mental health alone, that comparability is the whole value.
Considerations
Raw sums are not interpretable. Scores must be converted to T scores.
It is a generic quality of life summary, not a diagnostic tool, and it is insensitive to specific conditions.
Non English translations may carry distribution fees.
Software applications embedding PROMIS fall under a separate pricing arrangement with HealthMeasures. This is worth confirming for any commercial platform.
How to score the PROMIS Global-10
Conducting the assessment
The person answers ten items. Four designated items are summed for the physical health score and four for the mental health score, each giving a raw score from 4 to 20.
Interpretation
Each raw score is converted to a T score using the published lookup tables or the free HealthMeasures scoring service.
T scores have a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 10, calibrated to the US general population. Higher T scores indicate better health.
There are no severity bands in the classic sense. A T score of 50 is the population average, 40 is one standard deviation worse, and 60 one standard deviation better. Within half a standard deviation of the mean is conventionally described as within normal limits.
Clinical Considerations
Always convert to T scores. A raw sum tells you nothing and is not comparable.
Read the physical and mental health scores separately. They frequently diverge, and the divergence is clinically meaningful.
Use it for comparability, not for detail. Where you need to know what is wrong, use a condition specific measure alongside it.
PROMIS Global-10 use cases
Measuring overall physical and mental health in one short instrument
Comparing a population against US general population norms
Outcome reporting where physical and mental health must be reported together
Research across health conditions
Category
General Well-being
Research Summary
Hays, R. D., Bjorner, J. B., Revicki, D. A., Spritzer, K. L., & Cella, D. (2009). Development of physical and mental health summary scores from the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) global items. Quality of Life Research, 18(7), 873 to 880.
Hays, R. D., Schalet, B. D., Spritzer, K. L., & Cella, D. (2017). Two item PROMIS global physical and mental health scales. Journal of Patient-Reported Outcomes, 1, 2.
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Note on Assessment licensing
Some assessments are copyright protected and require a licence or the copyright holder's permission for clinical, commercial or digital use. Where that applies, obtaining and maintaining that permission is the responsibility of the practice or organisation using the assessment. Tacklit provides the digital administration, scoring and reporting. We do not grant, transfer or supply rights to the underlying instrument.
