Measuring health related quality of life (HRQoL) in community and facility-based care settings with the interRAI assessment instruments: development of a crosswalk to HUI3.

The present study provides strong evidence for the validity of the interRAI HRQoL based on comparisons of distributional properties with those obtained with survey data based on the HUI3. The results demonstrate the importance of admission criteria for home care and nursing home settings, where function plays a more important role than demographic or diagnostic criteria. The interRAI HRQoL has a distinct advantage because it is gathered as part of normal clinical practice in care settings where interRAI instruments are mandatory and are used to assess all eligible persons in those sectors. In particular, those with severe cognitive and functional impairments (who tend to be under-represented in survey data) will be evaluated using the interRAI tools. Future research should build on this work by providing direct, person-level comparisons of interRAI HRQoL index and HUI3 scores, as well as longitudinal analyses to examine responsiveness to change.