Biography:

Prior to joining the UMMS faculty, Dr. Ware founded QualityMetric Incorporated and served as its CEO and Chairman for more than 10 years. He served for 12 years as Senior Scientist, The Health Institute, Tufts Medical Center in Boston, and was the Principal Investigator for the Medical Outcomes Study (MOS), where he led the development of the SF-36^® Health Survey and other tools widely used in documenting disease burden and treatment outcomes. Prior to moving to Boston he was Senior Research Psychologist for 14 years at the RAND Corporation where he led the development of health status measures used in the Health Insurance Experiment.

He has published more than 400 peer-reviewed articles, including papers from the MOS which received the Academy Health "Article of the Year" Award for 1993. In the early 1990's, Dr. Ware was among the first to demonstrate the feasibility and advantages of computerized adaptive testing and other "modern" psychometric methods in assessing generic and disease-specific health outcomes. These studies led to the cross-calibration of the SF-36® Health Survey and other widely-used measures on common metrics so that results from different instruments could be compared. This novel work has been applied to numerous medical conditions and has had a substantial impact on the field, leading to a 2003 President's Award from the International Society of Quality of Life Research. His other awards and honors include Pepperdine University's 25th Annual Dolores Award to the outstanding graduate in psychology and education, Academy Health’s 1994 Distinguished Investigator Award for "significant and long-lasting contributions to the field of health services research," the 1998 Novartis/Zitter Group Outcomes Leadership Award for advancing the science of outcomes research, and the 1999 Foundation for Accountability (FACCT) Ellwood Award, presented in recognition of his lifetime efforts to create "a consumer-focused, accountable healthcare system". In 2002, Dr. Ware was the first recipient of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) Avedis Donabedian Outcomes Research Lifetime Achievement Award.

Academic Background:

1964 BA Psychology Pepperdine University, Los Angeles, CA

1966 MA General Psychology Pepperdine University, Los Angeles, CA

1974 Ph.D. Measurements/Statistics Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL

Research:

Dr. John E. Ware, Jr., Ph.D, President and CEO, John Ware Research Group, Inc. and is Professor and Chief, Outcomes Measurement Science in the Department of Quantitative Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS). He is an internationally recognized leader of the field of healthcare outcomes assessment and a member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM), National Academy of Sciences.

Dr Ware's research focuses onimproving patient reported outcomes (PRO) tools used in population health surveys and clinical research worldwide.