THE OUTCOMES MOVEMENT AND NEW MEASURES OF THE SEVERITY OF PSORIASIS

Traditionally physicians have assessed the severity of psoriasis on th e basis of involved surface area or other physical features. These mea sures are not highly reliable and do not quantify the extent to which the disease affects the patient, New approaches to health care assessm ent have been developed, including evaluation of the outcome of medica l care. This new direction in health care assessment has been describe d as the ''outcomes movement.'' This emphasizes the assessment of pati ents' outcomes with respect to quality of life and functional capacity , rather than traditional techniques that rely on the results of physi cal or laboratory examinations. New measures to assess treatment effec tiveness will almost certainly be used to allocate health care resourc es. We review the status of measures of psoriasis and the implications of newer methods for assessing disease impact and outcomes of therapy .