Improvement of quality of life (QOL) of the patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is very important. Practically, health status measurement (HSM) is beneficial to the assessment of QOL in arthritides, because the socioeconomical factor, one of 3 main factors in QOL, has numerous matters besides the medicine. There are many scales to assess health status so far, Health Assessment Questionnaire (HAQ) and Arthritis Impact Measurement Scales (AIMS) have been widely utilized because of their reliability, validity and sensitivity. We compared the health status in 105 of RA inpatients and that in 86 of RA outpatients by AIMS. Outpatients had significantly better physical status than inpatients. Our data showed a great discrepancy from that of Anderson. The reason for this discrepancy is presumably the differences in life style and daily activity between two countries. We are now trying to modify AIMS to fit Japanese.