The increasingly explicit use of health technology assessment continues to generate substantial public and academic policy debates. The debates are about puzzling issues whose correct resolution is not immediately obvious and the very explicitness of HTA’s use pinpoints the issues and locates...

Current National Health Service (NHS) policy places importance on allowing patients to choose the time and location of their treatment. However, existing evidence suggests that older people have distinct needs and preferences from those of the general population. This study aimed to elicit...

Aim: Pressure Ulcers are an important health care problem, recognized as ‘Never Events’ by the US Government. To date, there is no instrument to capture their health utility impact, or the value of treatments and prevention strategies. The Pressure Ulcer Quality of Life Utility Instrument...

Health care systems are increasingly under pressure to provide funding for innovative technologies. These technologies tend to be characterized by their potential to make valued contributions to patient health in areas of relative unmet need, high acquisition costs and great uncertainty in the...

The methodology used when estimating utilities assumes that the best health state in a health-related quality of life (HrQoL) measure is equivalent to perfect health, with both valued at one. In this paper we explore the impact of relaxing this assumption by treating measured utilities as...

Cost-utility analysis is used within the health technology assessment processes of many countries. For these analyses, patients typically indicate the health state that they are in based on a pre-defined descriptive classification. Each health state corresponds to a utility value; these values...