Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Very interesting article from Sampson, Parkin and Devlin (2024). Hard to summarize but worth a read. I have two excerpts below. The first describes the role of death in QALY calculations. The value attributed to ‘dead’ cannot affect the QALYs that are gained in any context; by definition, no QALYs can be generated by a…
How do you measure changes in quality of life for patients with cancer? Today we will review 3 different approaches: health state based, health state with age decrements, and health state with time-to-death (TTD) decrements. Health state based. One common approach is just to use the quality of life of a given health state. For…
This question seems simple, but answering the key factors that impact your happiness is complex. Is happiness based on your personal situation (e.g., family, job, income, health) measured in an absolute sense or relative to others? If measured in a relative sense, what reference point is used? One approach to measuring your life satisfaction is…
According to a paper by Bloom et al. (2010), the answer is ‘yes’…at least in the short run. The authors studied 96 workers from the Netherlands and asked these individuals about their well-being two weeks before their vacation, during their vacation and 1, 2 and 4 weeks after their vacation. Wellbeing was measured based on…
Let’s say we are interested in determining whether a particular treatment improves quality of life. Common measures of quality of life include EQ-5D, SF-12, and SF-36, among others. However, a systematic review of 237 randomized controlled trials found that only 43% collected SF-12 or SF-36 measures. If you are measuring a treatment’s effect on quality…
Many metrics purport to measure individuals quality of life. Tools such as the EQ-5D and SF-36 do so largely based on functional status. Using other surveys on individual preferences, one can estimate patient utility for any given functional status level (i.e,. EQ-5D or SF-36 score). What these scores ignore, however, is the social component of…