About

Maria Orlando Edelen (PhD) is a Quantitative Psychologist and Senior Behavioral Scientist at the RAND Corporation. Dr. Edelen's area of expertise is in psychometric methodology and health policy research with a special emphasis on patient-reported outcomes (PROs). She has made significant contributions to the broad goal of applying psychometric methods, especially item response theory, to the development, evaluation, refinement and clinical implementation of PROs. PRO measure development and implementation work includes leading an NIA-funded project to develop a brief PRO measure to screen for cognitive impairment, an NCCIH supplement to develop an ultra-short PROMIS Profile measure (the PROMIS-16 Profile v2.0), leading the development of the PROMIS Smoking Assessments, and directing a CMS-funded contract to identify candidate items for standardization across post-acute care settings. Current work includes co-leading an NCI-funded R01 project to implement PRO data collection among breast cancer patients receiving care in community cancer centers, and an NCCIH project to evaluate PROs for use in assessment of chronic pain. Other recent work has focused on the development of PRO-based quality measures in primary and palliative care, and patient assessment in post-acute care and hospice.