Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) are commonly used to evaluate the impact of new medical technologies on patient mortality and morbidity. However, use of QALYs Many authors have discussed the fact that standard assumptions result in utility functions that are unrealistically linear and separable, overlooking the diminishing marginal utility a fundamental property of utility functions in…
That is the title of a paper from Costa-Font and Vilaplana-Prieto (2025). They find the the value is very large indeed. Relative to a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the value of IC [informal care] ranges between 4.2% in France and 0.85% in Germany. Such relative value declines as the country’s share of formal LTC…
A paper by Kowal et al. (2023) does in fact measure the disparities in health outcomes. To do this, they use data from the American Community Survey (ACS), the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) and the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) to estimate differences in life expectancy (LY), quality-adjusted life expectancy (QALE), and disability-free life…
Cost effectiveness analyses (CEA) aim to examine how a new health technologies impact health outcomes and costs over a patient’s lifetime. While extrapolating long-run health benefits and measuring potential cost offsets are important, another important item to estimate is how the cost of the new health technology is likely to evolve over times. This is…
One key aspect of many medications is that they not only help people feel better, but often these medications can help them re-enter the workforce, work more hours, work more productively, or all of the above. However, when evaluating new treatments for diseases that impact older Medicare beneficiaries (≥65 years), should we take into account…
That is the title of a great review paper by Salah Ghabri, Dalia Dawoud and Michael Drummond. They discuss that guidance on the incorporation of adverse events (AEs) into economic models has not been standardized. Nevertheless, this paper provides helpful guidance. Specifically, the paper explores: (1) the incorporation of AEs in economic decision models, (2)…
If a child dies during childbirth, should the impact of the child’s death on parental quality of life be considered? What about interventions that prevent miscarriages; should the health of the fetus be considered or only that of the mother? A paper by Lamsal et al. (2024) conducts a systematic review to examine which individual’s…
A paper by Drummond et al. (2023) examines how health technology assessment bodies deal with the challenge of value assessment for cell and gene therapies (also known as Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMPs) in Europe). To do this the authors: …undertook i) a targeted review of the literature on the clinical and economic evidence needs…
Why is it so hard to estimate the value of orphan drugs indicated for the treatment of rare diseases? There are a variety of reasons, but a scoping review by Grand et al. (2024) provides a nice summary of these issues. Key challenges include small sample sizes for nearly all parameters and lack of data…
Illnesses impact not only the patients, but oftentimes impact caregivers and family members as well. However, most economic analyses do not incorporate a diseases’ spillover impacts on caregivers. …a recent review of NICE evaluations revealed that only 3% of technology appraisals included caregiver health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in cost-utility analyses (CUAs). Similarly, Lamsal [2022]…