Standard cost-effectiveness analysis underestimates health care benefits

Standard methods for calculating the effect of a treatment, such as those used in cost-effectiveness analyses, underestimate the health care benefits that can be gained from therapies used to treat short-term pain (lasting from one month to one year). Marieke Verschuuren has concluded this from her research into which values people attribute to a health situation involving short-term pain when they are given more leeway with regard to their answers than they would have been given with the standard methodology. Verschuuren also offers new insights into the best way to describe relationships in research data on states of health. In the most frequently used methods there is a threshold effect: People only attribute a value for a less than perfect state of health if a certain threshold of severity has been crossed. Models that specifically take this threshold effect into account perform better than models that do not do this. Currently, however, the latter models are still in common use.

Marieke Verschuuren

Quality-Adjusted Life Years and Trade-Off Exercises: exploring methodology and validity

PhD advisor 1: Prof. B.A. van Hout
PhD advisor 2: Prof. G.J. Bonsel