title: Utilities and quality-adjusted life years.
abstract: Utilities and quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) are reviewed, with particular focus on their use in technology assessment. This article provides a broad overview and perspective on these two techniques and their interrelationship, with reference to other sources for details of implementation. The historical development, assumptions, strengths/weaknesses, and applications of each are summarized. Utilities are specifically designed for individual decision-making under uncertainty, but, with additional assumptions, utilities can be aggregated across individuals to provide a group utility function. QALYs are designed to aggregate in a single summary measure the total health improvement for a group of individuals, capturing improvements from impacts on both quantity of life and quality of life--with quality of life broadly defined. Utilities can be used as the quality-adjustment weights for QALYs; they are particularly appropriate for that purpose, and this combination provides a powerful and highly useful variation on cost-effectiveness analysis known as cost-utility analysis.
authors.forename: G W
authors.initials: GW
authors.lastname: Torrance
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Feeny
mesh_terms: D003662:Decision Theory; D004467:Economics; D006291:Health Policy; D006801:Humans; D008017:Life Expectancy; D015233:Models, Statistical; D011050:Policy Making; D011788:Quality of Life; D013673:Technology Assessment, Biomedical; D026712:Value of Life