Week 2 - K - Health economics - QALY, ICER, DALY

Question 1

what has been forgone once you buy an item. Used for economics but easier to understand with reference to time – the 20 minutes spent reading this is 20 minutes you haven’t spent doing the thousand other demands on your time. You therefore want to maximise the utility (usefulness) of your time/money.

What is this known as?

Answer 1

This is opportunity cost - if you could do one of two things for an hour the opportunity cost would be the alternative option

So if you decline working extra shift - the opportunity cost is the wage from that shift

Question 2

Often used to determine the impact of life-prolonging drugs, but can be applied to any intervention (IF someone has done the research to measure the impact on quality of life)

It s the duration of the quality of life

What is this measured in?

Answer 2

QALY - Quality adjusted life years

How many years of life a drug can give where the life is lived healthily

Question 3

What is the ratio for what organisations like NICE usually use to determine whether or not a treatment meets their criteria for “cost effectiveness”?

It is measured in the cost/ per quality of life years

Answer 3

This is known as the incremental cost effectiveness ratio (ICER)

Question 4

It is a description of how well an intervention achieves a goal. We use cost benefit analysis to measure this. Costs are usually financial, or converted into financial terms. Benefits are often QALYs, but can be anything so long as you are comparing like with like (so if you compare tonsillectomy with no intervention, counting the number of sore throats in both groups would be fine, but doesn’t let you see how it compares with other procedures).

WHat is cost beneft anaylsis?

Answer 4

Cost benefit analysis can be used to measure the cost effectiveness of a procedure by assigning a monetary value to measure the effect

Question 5

To compare cost effectiveness you need three things, what are these?

Answer 5

To compare cost effectiveness you need:

An outcome

A cost

And something to compare it

Question 6

The quality of life years is the number of years of life with health due to the effect a drug will have

What is the term used to describe years of life lost due to ill health?

Answer 6

This is the disability adjusted life years

Question 7

How is the disability adjusted life years calculated? (DALY = YLL + YLD)

Answer 7

To calculate the disability adjusted life years

Need to add the years of life lost plus the years of life with the disability

This gives the total number of years that the person has lost due to the illness/disability