Economic evaluations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) incorporate utilities through multi-attribute utility (MAU) measures, most commonly the EQ-5D, to report health-related quality-of-life (HR-QOL) changes or differences. Questions have been raised about the sensitivity of these...

The objective of this article was to describe and illustrate a comprehensive approach for estimating clinically important differences (CIDs) in health-related quality-of-life (HR-QOL). A literature review and pilot study were conducted to determine whether effect size-based benchmarks are...

One of the most common means to test for the temporal reliability of willingness-to-pay (WTP) values is the

In economic evaluation of healthcare programmes both QOL and productivity of patients are aspects to be studied. Normally, the former is part of the measurement of the effectiveness of the programme and the latter is part of the measurement of its costs. In this paper we highlight the...

Diabetes mellitus is the seventh leading cause of death (sixth leading cause of death by disease) in the US. Approximately 5.9% of the US population has diabetes and one-third of those with diabetes are unaware that they have the condition. Diabetes is the leading cause of adult blindness,...

As the population of elderly people worldwide continues to grow, successful aging has risen to the top of the health policy agenda. The definition of successful aging includes the maintenance of physical and mental function, as well as continued social engagement. Given this definition,...

A strong association between lower socioeconomic status and worse health has been documented within many countries, but little work has been done to compare the strength of this relationship across countries. We compare the strength of the relationship between income and self-reported health in...

The validity of estimates of resource utilisation based on patient recall has not been firmly established. A comprehensive literature search was conducted to identify studies that used patient self-reports to derive estimates of healthcare resource utilisation, direct nonmedical costs and...

Currently, health state values are usually obtained from members of the general public trying to imagine what the state would be like rather than by patients who are actually in the various states of health. Valuations of a health state by patients tend to vary from those of the general...

This article aims to evaluate the results of two different approaches underlying the attempts to reduce health inequalities in France. In the At this stage, a pragmatic analysis based on both the comparison of regional hospital budgets during the period 1992-2003 (calculated using a