Ideally, drug and non-drug therapies should have direct benefit to the patients who use them.  In the past surrogate markers, or physician selected outcomes were used in isolation to determine if a therapy was “beneficial” to patients.  Unfortunately, these prior methods did not always measure what is of greatest importance or relevance to patients.  Our institute focuses on the development of outcome measures that are proven to measure the aspects that are most important to patients.  Direct patient input and advanced psychometric methodology are used to build our instruments so that the true benefit of novel therapies to patients can be adequately determined during clinical trials.