PROMIS aims to 1) develop and test a bank of items measuring patient-reported outcomes (PROs), 2) develop a set of publicly available computerized adaptive tests (CATs) for the clinical research community, and 3) maintain the PROMIS Assessment Center, a dynamic application developed under the NIH Roadmap that allows researchers to centralize research activities such as patient reported outcome instrument development, study administration, data management, and storage of statistical analysis results. This tool may find quick adaptation by some; however, there are caveats that are important in designing, analyzing, and describing studies that use PROMIS while it is still in development. We will discuss the current state of the PROMIS item banks, paper short forms, and CATs with respect to what instruments are ready to put into what type of clinical or epidemiologic study.