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PROMIS Illness Burden

PROMIS. "Illness Burden" scoring manual.

Key findings used in wiki

  • PROMIS measures illness burden as its own construct — a 6-item adult short form capturing the overall impact of illness on daily life, activities, and functioning, with standardized T-score interpretation.
  • Illness burden is measured separately from specific symptom constructs (fatigue, pain interference, depression) because the perceived overall weight of illness is a distinct signal from any single symptom score.
  • For a caregiver, the care-recipient's illness burden is often a structural pressure on the household — it shapes how much care is needed, how unpredictable the day is, and how much of life is organized around illness.
  • In GiveCare's methodology pages, this supports treating care-recipient illness load as a legible structural pressure within the caregiver-facing SDOH lens, rather than leaving it implicit in diagnosis labels alone.