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...