A fundamental benefit that is conferred by medical treatments is to increase the health-related quality of life (HRQOL) that is experienced by patients. Various descriptive systems exist to define a patient's health state, and we address the problem of assigning an HRQOL value to any given state...

It has long been recognised that respondent characteristics can impact on the values they give to health states. This paper reports on the findings from applying a non-parametric approach to estimate the covariates in a model of SF-6D health state values using Bayesian methods. The data set is...

Expected value of sample information (EVSI) involves simulating data collection, Bayesian updating, and re-examining decisions. Bayesian updating in Weibull models typically requires Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). <P>We examine five methods for calculating posterior expected net benefits: two...</p>

In this paper we consider the health utility index mark II for quantifying and describing a population’s health related quality of life over health states composed of multiple attributes. This measure can be used for various purposes such as evaluating the severity of the effect of a disease...

We examine the relationship between Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) and Standard Gamble (SG) assumed in the development of the multiplicative multi-attribute utility functions (M-MAUFs) for the Health Utilities Index (HUI) Mark 2 and Mark 3, using data from a UK valuation study of the HUI2. A range...

Objectives: To identify the impact of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) on health-related quality of life (HR-QOL), time off work and the utilisation and cost of health services. Design: A case-control study was undertaken matching patients with IBS and controls. Quality-of-life information was...

This paper reviews the role of patient preferences within the framework of cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA). CEA typically adopts a system-wide perspective by focusing upon efficiency across groups in the allocation of scarce healthcare resources, whereas treatment decisions are made over...

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a common, chronic disease where health-related quality of life (HRQL) is one of the main goals of therapy. As such, instruments used to measure HRQL in RA must be able to discriminate across RA severity. The two basic categories of instruments used to measure HRQL...