title: Toward a more universal approach in health valuation.
abstract: By polling individual responses to hypothetical scenarios, valuation studies estimate population preferences toward health on a quality-adjusted life year (QALY) scale. The scenarios typically involve trade-offs in time (time trade-off (TTO)), risk (standard gamble (SG)), or number of persons affected (person trade-off (PTO)). This paper revisits the QALY assumptions and provides a coherent health econometric approach that unites TTO, SG, and PTO techniques under a common estimator. The proposed approach avoids the use of ratio statistics in QALY estimation and the common convention of arbitrarily changing trade-off responses. As an example, 34% of the TTO responses from the seminal Measurement and Valuation of Health study were changed in the original UK analysis, which led to substantially lower QALY estimates. As a general rule, if the original estimate is less than 0.5 QALYs, add 0.25 QALYs to get the new estimates.
authors.affiliation: Moffitt Cancer Center, Health Outcomes and Behavior, Tampa, FL, USA. benjamin.craig@moffitt.org
authors.forename: Benjamin M
authors.initials: BM
authors.lastname: Craig
authors.forename: Jan J V
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Busschbach
mesh_terms: D000203:Activities of Daily Living / Q000523:psychology*; D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D057240:Patient Preference / Q000523:psychology*; D019057:Quality-Adjusted Life Years; D012648:Self Care / Q000523:psychology*; D018434:Sickness Impact Profile