Methodological Issues Surrounding the Use of Baseline Health-Related Quality of Life Data to Inform Trial-Based Economic Evaluations of Interventions Within Emergency and Critical Care Settings: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

warwick.ac.uk/lib-publicationsOriginal citation: Dritsaki, Melina, Achana, Felix A., Mason, James and Petrou, Stavros. (2017) Methodological issues surrounding the use of baseline health-related quality of life data to inform trial-based economic evaluations of interventions within emergency and critical care settings : a systematic literature review. PharmacoEconomics. Permanent WRAP URL:http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/85039 Copyright and reuse:The Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP) makes this work by researchers of the University of Warwick available open access under the following conditions. Copyright © and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable the material made available in WRAP has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for profit purposes without prior permission or charge. Provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. Publisher's statement:"The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40273-016-0485-x " A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the 'permanent WRAP url' above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. Results: A total of 4224 published reports were screened, 19 of which met the study inclusion criteria (mean trial size 1,670); 14 (74 %) from the UK, 4 (21%) from other European countries and 1 (5%) from India. Twelve studies (63%) were based in emergency departments and 7 (37%) in intensive care units. Only one study was able to elicit patient-reported health-related quality of life at baseline. To overcome the lack of baseline data when estimating QALYs, 8 (42%) studies assigned a fixed utility weight corresponding to either death, an unconscious health state or a country-specific norm to patients at baseline, 4 (21%) ignored baseline utilities, 3 (16%) applied values from another study, 1 (5%) generated utility values via retrospective recall and 1 (5%) elicited utilities from experts. A preliminary exploration of these methods shows that incremental QALY estimation is unlikely to be biased if balanced trial allocation is achieved and subsequent collection of health-related quality of life data occurs at the earliest possible opportunity following commencement of treatment followed by adequate number of follow-up assessments. Conclusion:Trial-based cost-utility analyses within emergency and critical illness settings have applied different methods for QALY estimation, employing disparate assumptions about the health-related quality of life of patients at baseline. Where baseline measurem...

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