Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch.
MCDA-based deliberation to value health states: lessons learned from a pilot study. Health and Quality of Life Outcomes [PubMed] Published 1st July 2019
The rejection of the EQ-5D-5L value set for England indicates something of a crisis in health state valuation. Evidently, there is a lack of trust in the quantitative data and methods used. This is despite decades of methodological development. Perhaps we need a completely different approach. Could we instead develop a value set using qualitative methods?
A value set based on qualitative research aligns with an idea forwarded by Daniel Hausman, who has argued for the use of deliberative approaches. This could circumvent the problems associated with asking people to give instant (and possibly ill-thought-out) responses to preference elicitation surveys. The authors of this study report on the first ever (pilot) attempt to develop a consensus value set using methods of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) and deliberation. The study attempts to identify a German value set for the SF-6D.
The study included 34 students in a one-day conference setting. A two-step process was followed for the MCDA using MACBETH (the Measuring Attractiveness by a Categorical Based Evaluation Technique), which uses pairwise comparisons to derive numerical scales without quantitative assessments. First, a scoring procedure was conducted for each of the six dimensions. Second, a weighting was identified for each dimension. After an introductory session, participants were allocated into groups of five or six and each group was tasked with scoring one SF-6D dimension. Within each group, consensus was achieved. After these group sessions, all participants were brought together to present and validate the results. In this deliberation process, consensus was achieved for all domains except pain. Then the weighting session took place, but resulted in no consensus. Subsequent to the one-day conference, a series of semi-structured interviews were conducted with moderators. All the sessions and interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analysed qualitatively.
In short, the study failed. A consensus value set could not be identified. Part of the problem was probably in the SF-6D descriptive system, particularly in relation to pain, which was interpreted differently by different people. But the main issue was that people had different opinions and didn’t seem willing to move towards consensus with a societal perspective in mind. Participants broadly fell into three groups – one in favour of prioritising pain and mental health, one opposed to trading-off SF-6D dimensions and favouring equal weights, and another group that was not willing to accept any trade-offs.
Despite its apparent failure, this seems like an extremely useful and important study. The authors provide a huge amount of detail regarding what they did, what went well, and what might be done differently next time. I’m not sure it will ever be possible to get a group of people to reach a consensus on a value set. The whole point of preference-based measures is surely that different people have different priorities, and they should be expected to disagree. But I think we should expect that the future of health state valuation lies in mixed methods. There might be more success in a qualitative and deliberative approach to scoring combined with a quantitative approach to weighting, or perhaps a qualitative approach informed by quantitative data that demands trade-offs. Whatever the future holds, this study will be a valuable guide.
Preference-based health-related quality of life outcomes associated with preterm birth: a systematic review and meta-analysis. PharmacoEconomics [PubMed] Published 9th December 2019
Premature and low birth weight babies can experience a whole host of negative health outcomes. Most studies in this context look at short-term biomedical assessments or behavioural and neurodevelopmental indicators. But some studies have sought to identify the long-term consequences on health-related quality of life by identifying health state utility values. This study provides us with a review and meta-analysis of such values.
The authors screened 2,139 articles from their search and included 20 in the review. Lots of data were extracted from the articles, which is helpfully tabulated in the paper. The majority of the studies included adolescents and focussed on children born very preterm or at very low birth weight.
For the meta-analysis, the authors employed a linear mixed-effects meta-regression, which is an increasingly routine approach in this context. The models were used to estimate the decrement in utility values associated with preterm birth or low birth weight, compared with matched controls. Conveniently, all but one of the studies used a measure other than the HUI2 or HUI3, so the analysis was restricted to these two measures. Preterm birth was associated with an average decrement of 0.066 and extremely low birth weight with a decrement of 0.068. The mean estimated utility scores for the study groups was 0.838, compared with 0.919 for the control groups.
Reviews of utility values are valuable as they provide modellers with a catalogue of potential parameters that can be selected in a meaningful and transparent way. Even though this is a thorough and well-reported study, it’s a bit harder to see how its findings will be used. Most reviews of utility values relate to a particular disease, which might be prevented or ameliorated by treatment, and the value of this treatment depends on the utility values selected. But how will these utility values be used? The avoidance of preterm or low-weight birth is not the subject of most evaluations in the neonatal setting. Even if it was, how valuable are estimates from a single point in adolescence? The authors suggest that future research should seek to identify a trajectory of utility values over the life course. But, even if we could achieve this, it’s not clear to me how this should complement utility values identified in relation to the specific health problems experienced by these people.
The new and non-transparent Cancer Drugs Fund. PharmacoEconomics [PubMed] Published 12th December 2019
Not many (any?) health economists liked the Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF). It was set-up to give special treatment to cancer drugs, which weren’t assessed on the same basis as other drugs being assessed by NICE. In 2016, the CDF was brought within NICE’s remit, with medicines available through the CDF requiring a managed access agreement. This includes agreements on data collection and on payments by the NHS during the period. In this article, the authors contend that the new CDF process is not sufficiently transparent.
Three main issued are raised: i) lack of transparency relating to the value of CDF drugs, ii) lack of transparency relating to the cost of CDF drugs, and iii) the amount of time that medicines remain on the CDF. The authors tabulate the reporting of ICERs according to the decisions made, showing that the majority of treatment comparisons do not report ICERs. Similarly, the time in the CDF is tabulated, with many indications being in the CDF for an unknown amount of time. In short, we don’t know much about medicines going through the CDF, except that they’re probably costing a lot.
I’m a fan of transparency, in almost all contexts. I think it is inherently valuable to share information widely. It seems that the authors of this paper do too. A lack of transparency in NICE decision-making is a broader problem that arises from the need to protect commercially sensitive pricing agreements. But what this paper doesn’t manage to do is to articulate why anybody who doesn’t support transparency in principle should care about the CDF in particular. Part of the authors’ argument is that the lack of transparency prevents independent scrutiny. But surely NICE is the independent scrutiny? The authors argue that it is a problem that commissioners and the public cannot assess the value of the medicines, but it isn’t clear why that should be a problem if they are not the arbiters of value. The CDF has quite rightly faced criticism over the years, but I’m not convinced that its lack of transparency is its main problem.
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