A health economics professor believes more research is needed on quality of life-adjusted years to explore the way we describe health states, the elicitation of patient values, and how to develop methods for obtaining informed general population preferences.
Elly A. Stolk, MSc and Floortje E. van Nooten, MSc
Two medical technology researchers argue that patients' own valuations of their health states may result in devaluation of interventions that can help them.
The conventional quality-adjusted life years approach to resource allocation has greater societal value if it is distributed among many rather than concentrated on a few, assuming that severity of illness is the same.
The objective is to compare the costs of providing the same level of quality. When resource-use and quality measures are juxtaposed, the resources used to provide the same level of quality can be compared.