title: Automatic assessment of socioeconomic impact on cardiac rehabilitation.
abstract: Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) and Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs), which capture life expectancy and quality of the remaining life-years, are applied in a new method to measure socioeconomic impacts related to health. A 7-step methodology estimating the impact of health interventions based on DALYs, QALYs and functioning changes is presented. It relates the latter (1) to the EQ-5D-5L questionnaire (2) to automatically calculate the health status before and after the intervention (3). This change of status is represented as a change in quality of life when calculating QALYs gained due to the intervention (4). In order to make an economic assessment, QALYs gained are converted to DALYs averted (5). Then, by inferring the cost/DALY from the cost associated to the disability in terms of DALYs lost (6) and taking into account the cost of the action, cost savings due to the intervention are calculated (7) as an objective measure of socioeconomic impact. The methodology is implemented in Java. Cases within the framework of cardiac rehabilitation processes are analyzed and the calculations are based on 200 patients who underwent different cardiac-rehabilitation processes. Results show that these interventions result, on average, in a gain in QALYs of 0.6 and a cost savings of 8,000 €.
authors.affiliation: Cardiac Electrophysiology Unit, Hospital Clínic Universitari de Barcelona, Villarroel, 170, Barcelona 08036, Spain. calvo@clinic.ub.es.
authors.forename: Mireia
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Calvo
authors.forename: Laia
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Subirats
authors.forename: Luigi
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Ceccaroni
authors.forename: José María
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Maroto
authors.forename: Carmen
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: de Pablo
authors.forename: Felip
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Miralles
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D006304:Health Status; D006331:Heart Diseases / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D019057:Quality-Adjusted Life Years; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D013030:Spain