Technical Performance and Clinical Relevance: Lessons from the GAMUT Study

There is an increasing interest in combining information, measurement, and communication technologies into systems for distributed diagnosis and home healthcare. The developer of such systems, however, quickly discovers that technical performance is of little importance by itself, without any reference to clinical relevance. This paper presents some of the lessons learned in the course of a medical device study set to resolve the problem of tuning technical performance (accuracy) to clinical relevance (adequacy) in designing measurement devices for health care purposes.