NICE’s new Severity Adjustment

In the United Kingdom, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) made an update to their health technology evaluations manual in January 2022. Of particular interest, section 6.2 of the manual states that the review committee “will consider the associated absolute and proportional QALY shortfall.”  The committee defined QALY shortfall two ways: Absolute…

Health Years in Total (HYT)

Standard quality approach compares the difference in QALYs which is a function of survival and quality of life during each survival period.  Consider the comparison of treatments A and B, where treatment A is the novel treatment and treatment B is the standard of care. Under the QALY based approach this is calculated as Where…

Is the value of a QALY constant?

Standard cost-effectiveness analysis assumes that any gain in quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) should be valued equally. This does not sound unreasonable, but is it true in practice? Consider two potential violations of constant value of QALY gains: scope insensitivity and severity independence. I define each of these below: Scope insensitivity. This assumes that individuals value…

What Do Value Assessments Miss?

To find out the answer to this question, check out a live webinar on Wednesday, March 13th at 1:30pm EDT led by Dr. Anupam Jena, MD, PhD. Dr. Jena is a Harvard Professor and Precision Health Economics Scientific Advisor. In this unique one-hour webinar, Dr. Jena will outline a broader framework for assessing value to improve identification of not…