Social evaluation of health care versus personal evaluation of health states. Evidence on the validity of four health-state scaling instruments using Norwegian and Australian surveys.
In most of the cost-utility literature, quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) gains are interpreted as a measure of social value. Given this interpretation, the validity of different multi-attribute health-state scaling instruments may be tested by comparing the values they provide on the 0-1 QALY scale with directly elicited preferences for person trade-offs between different treatments (equivalence of numbers of different patients treated). Norwegian and Australian public preferences as measured by the person trade-off suggest that the EuroQol Instrument assigns excessively low values to health states. This seems to be even more true of the McMaster Health Classification System. The Quality of Well-being Scale appears to compress states toward the middle of the 0-1 scale. By contrast, the Rosser/Kind index fits reasonably well with directly measured person trade-off data.
Nord
E
E
Norwegian National Institute of Public Health.
Richardson
J
J
Macarounas-Kirchmann
K
K
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D001315:Australia; D016001:Confidence Intervals; D004522:Educational Status; D005260:Female; D006302:Health Services Research / Q000379:methods*; D006305:Health Status Indicators; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009664:Norway; D011788:Quality of Life; D012945:Social Values; D026712:Value of Life