Comparing the Noncomparable: The Need for Equivalence Measures That Make Sense in Health-Economic Evaluations

F Reed Johnson; Frank I Scott; Shelby D Reed; James D Lewis; Meenakshi Bewtra

doi:10.1016/j.jval.2019.03.011

Comparing the Noncomparable: The Need for Equivalence Measures That Make Sense in Health-Economic Evaluations

Value Health. 2019 Jun;22(6):684-692. doi: 10.1016/j.jval.2019.03.011. Epub 2019 May 17.

Authors

F Reed Johnson¹, Frank I Scott², Shelby D Reed³, James D Lewis⁴, Meenakshi Bewtra⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Population Health Sciences & Duke Clinical Research Institute, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA. Electronic address: reed.johnson@duke.edu.
² Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora, CO, USA.
³ Department of Population Health Sciences & Duke Clinical Research Institute, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
⁴ Division of Gastroenterology, Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA.

PMID: 31198186
DOI: 10.1016/j.jval.2019.03.011

Abstract

Background: The popularity of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) has been resistant to concerns about validity and reliability. Utility-theoretic outcome equivalents are widely used in other areas of applied economics. Equivalence values can be derived for time, money, risk, and other metrics. These equivalence measures preserve all available information about individual preferences and are valid measures of individual welfare changes.

Objective: The objective of this study was to derive alternative generalized equivalence measures from first principles and illustrate their application in an empirical comparative-effectiveness example.

Methods: We specify a general-equilibrium model incorporating neoclassical utility functions, health production function, severity-duration preferences, and labor-market tradeoff function. The empirical implementation takes advantage of discrete-choice experiment methods that are widely accepted in other areas of applied economics and increasingly in health economics. We illustrate the practical significance of restrictive QALY assumptions using comparative-effectiveness results based on both QALYs and estimates of welfare-theoretic time-equivalent values for anti-tumor necrosis factor and prolonged corticosteroid treatments for Crohn's disease in three distinct preference classes.

Results: The QALY difference between the two treatments is 0.2 months, while time-equivalent values range between 0.5 and 1.3 months for aggregate and class-specific differences. Thus, the QALY-based analysis understates welfare-theoretic values by 60%-85%.

Conclusion: These results suggest that using disease-specific equivalence values offer a meaningful alternative to QALYs to compare global outcomes across treatments. The equivalence values approach is consistent with principles of welfare economics and offers several features not represented in QALYs, including accounting for preference nonlinearities in disease severity and duration, inclusion of preference-relevant nonclinical healthcare factors, representing preferences of clinically-relevant patient subpopulations, and including utility losses related to risk aversion.

Keywords: discrete-choice experiments; quality-adjusted life years; stated preference; time-equivalent value; willingness to pay.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Cost-Benefit Analysis / methods
Cost-Benefit Analysis / standards*
Cost-Benefit Analysis / statistics & numerical data
Humans
Models, Economic
Quality-Adjusted Life Years*
Reproducibility of Results
Time Factors