Attributes of health; measurement of health; value of health;
value of life; value of avoiding risk of ill-health; utility measures of health-related quality of life; stated and revealed preference methods of measuring willingness to pay; conjoint analysis.
Some recent research from the Centre for Health Economics at Monash University has quantified something that we are all aware of: fudging in the measurement of health-related quality of life. They have found that, on average, randomly changing from one… Read More »The ‘Q’ in the QALY: are we fudging it?
Economics is largely about trade-offs and compromise. Academics study the former but don’t often engage in the latter. In health economics, as in other fields, a key trade-off is between equity and efficiency. We’ve been studying this for a.very.long.time. Despite this, as… Read More »The potential of the super QALY to reconcile the key contentions in health economics
This month’s meeting will take place Monday 6th May, at 5pm London time. That’ll be 11am in New Orleans and 7pm in Athens. Join the Facebook event here. We’ll also hold an antipodal meeting 12 hours later on Tuesday 7th May,… Read More »#HEJC for 06/05/2013
In economic evaluations in health, time matters. More time in a bad health state is necessarily worse (or no better) than a smaller amount of time in said health state. Likewise, the value of an intervention increases with the duration… Read More »Considering time perception
Last year the UK government announced the establishment of a £600 million cancer drug fund, to be spent over 3 years. This represents a minuscule amount of money compared to the NHS’s annual budget, which is in excess of £100,000,000,000. However, it… Read More »Cancer drugs and public preferences
Submission from David Parkin There’s a problem with the way that health economists and others describe the properties that a health state index should have. The main reason we want such an index is to calculate Quality Adjusted Life Years.… Read More »What does a health value of zero mean?
Recently, I’ve witnessed an ever-increasing number of condition-specific utility measures being developed. Much work is being carried out by The University of Sheffield on measures such as the AQL-5D for asthma, and the EORTC-8D for cancer. I struggle to see their use.… Read More »Condition-specific utility measures?
I was recently directed towards a new report on the EQ-5D, by the NICE Decision Support Unit at the University of Sheffield. As health economists we can all see the benefits of a measure like the EQ-5D, but it’s also… Read More »The EQ-5D: Keep calm and carry on
The ‘well-being valuation method’ is a recently developed technique for valuing the effect, in monetary terms, of a health problem on an individual’s well-being. The method involves calculating the compensating variation necessary to maintain the same level of well-being after suffering from… Read More »The well-being valuation approach: Solution or convolution?
Back in 2005, NICE and the Department of Health here in the UK set about trying to figure out the level at which society valued a QALY, and also whether different QALYs should be assigned different values. The results of… Read More »Is a QALY a QALY or not? The SVQ project and the value of life