Cornell Medical Index response as a predictor of mortality

Interview or questionnaire response as a measure of health or medical status has usually been validated by tests of agreement with physicians' evaluations of the same subjects at a point in time. The self-reporting of symptoms has been used and tested as a screening-type index of the medical diagnoses which would have been obtained, given the more expensive and definitive set of procedures of professional history, physical examination, and laboratory tests. In survey circumstances, symptoms have been found to be of poor validity as surrogate measures of disease.