Dr. Daphna Harel, alongside Applied Statistics for Social Science Research Master’s alum Yining Lu and colleagues published an article in The Journal of Rheumatology evaluating a novel "Item Response Tree" (IRTree) method for scoring the Health Assessment Questionnaire (HAQ) against legacy scoring methods to measure functional disability in patients with systemic sclerosis. While the comprehensive IRTree-based method outperformed some alternative frameworks in measuring physical function and pain, its performance did not surpass the traditional HAQ-Disability Index (HAQ-DI). The standard HAQ-DI is already highly effective, easy to implement, and backed by extensive comparative data making it the preferred method for clinical use.