Deriving health utilities from the MacNew Heart Disease Quality of Life Questionnaire.
BACKGROUND
Quality of life is included in the economic evaluation of health services by measuring the preference for health states, i.e. health state utilities. However, most intervention studies include a disease-specific, not a utility, instrument. Consequently, there has been increasing use of statistical mapping algorithms which permit utilities to be estimated from a disease-specific instrument. The present paper provides such algorithms between the MacNew Heart Disease Quality of Life Questionnaire (MacNew) instrument and six multi-attribute utility (MAU) instruments, the Euroqol (EQ-5D), the Short Form 6D (SF-6D), the Health Utilities Index (HUI) 3, the Quality of Wellbeing (QWB), the 15D (15 Dimension) and the Assessment of Quality of Life (AQoL-8D).


METHODS
Heart disease patients and members of the healthy public were recruited from six countries. Non-parametric rank tests were used to compare subgroup utilities and MacNew scores. Mapping algorithms were estimated using three separate statistical techniques.


RESULTS
Mapping algorithms achieved a high degree of precision. Based on the mean absolute error and the intra class correlation the preferred mapping is MacNew into SF-6D or 15D. Using the R squared statistic the preferred mapping is MacNew into AQoL-8D.


CONCLUSIONS
The algorithms reported in this paper enable MacNew data to be mapped into utilities predicted from any of six instruments. This permits studies which have included the MacNew to be used in cost utility analyses which, in turn, allows the comparison of services with interventions across the health system.
Flinders University, Australia.
Gang
G
Chen
Monash University, Australia.
John
J
McKie
Monash University, Australia.
Munir A
MA
Khan
Monash University, Australia jeffrey.richardson@monash.edu.
Jeff R
JR
Richardson
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000465:Algorithms; D001315:Australia; D002170:Canada; D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D005260:Female; D005858:Germany; D017048:Health Care Costs; D006331:Heart Diseases / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000191:economics* / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D038622:Internationality; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009664:Norway; D017063:Outcome Assessment, Health Care; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D011788:Quality of Life; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014481:United States
MacNew Heart Disease Quality of Life Questionnaire; Quality of life; heart disease; mapping; multi-attribute utility