Havelaar, in Encyclopedia of Food Safety, 2014 Cost–Utility Analysis (Cost-Effectiveness Analysis)Ĭost–utility analysis incorporates changes in the quantity of life (mortality) and changes in the quality of life (morbidity) into a single ‘unit of health’ metric. Inclusion of indirect costs could lead to double counting because if the effectiveness measure is sufficiently comprehensive, it is believed to subsume the consequences of productivity loss. Furthermore, it is recommended that only direct costs be considered in the numerator. Cost-utility analyses, by providing a common metric in the denominator, allow comparisons of interventions across different disease states. Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine 67, 68 and the Canadian Coordinating Office of Health Technology Assessment 65 that cost-utility analysis should supplant all other types of economic analyses. They can be elicited either directly by asking respondents to reveal their preferences through techniques such as the standard gamble or time trade-off or indirectly by having respondents describe themselves using a health classification system where preferences have been pre-measured for defined health states. Utilities or health state preferences can be collected from either patients or the general public. 63–66 Utilities attempt to aggregate the morbidity and mortality effects of an intervention into a single measure, usually a quality-adjusted life year. The cost-utility analysis also considers healthcare costs and health effects, but the effectiveness measure attempts to value the consequences of the health outcomes by adjusting the outcomes by health state preference scores or utility weights. Clarke MD, MSc, Pantelis Panopalis MD, in Systemic Lupus Erythematosus, 2007 Cost Utility Given that the QALY can be used to measure the survival and QoL benefits of a healthcare technology, the QALY can serve as a common metric from which to compare the benefits of very different healthcare technologies.Īnn E.
The QoL component of the QALY is measured using a metric known as a health utility hence, the term cost-utility analysis is used to describe this form of CEA. A QALY accounts for both survival and QoL benefits associated with the use of a healthcare technology.
It therefore provides a broader context in which to make judgments about the value for money of using a particular drug.ĬUA is a special case of CEA, where the numerator of the ICER is a measure of cost and the denominator is measured typically using a metric called the QALY. The use of incremental cost-utility ratios enables the cost of achieving a health benefit by treatment with a drug to be assessed against similar ratios calculated for other health interventions (e.g., surgery or screening by mammography). An increased quality of life (QoL) is expressed as a utility value on a scale of 0 (dead) to one (perfect quality of life). This approach incorporates both increases in survival time and changes in quality of life into one measure. The ICER in this case is usually expressed as the incremental cost to gain an extra QALY. CUA expresses the value for money in terms of a single type of health outcome.
Differing from cost-benefit analysis, cost-utility analysis is used to compare two different drugs or procedures whose benefits may be different. CUA is used to determine cost in terms of utilities, to say in quantity and quality of life. Mahendra Rai, Richa Goyal, in Pharmaceutical Medicine and Translational Clinical Research, 2018 33.3.3 Cost Utility AnalysisĬost utility analysis (CUA) is an economic analysis in which the incremental cost of a program from a particular point of view is compared to the incremental health improvement expressed in the unit of quality adjusted life years (QALYs).