The Cost-effectiveness of Hearing-Aid Fitting in the Netherlands

Abstract

On the basis of this base-case estimate, fitting of hearing aids is considered a cost-effective health care intervention. The CI indicates that the result is not unambiguously positive, probably because the EuroQol lacked sensitivity for the evaluation of hearing-aid fitting. Until now, no study has found an effect of hearing-aid fitting on generic quality of life. Therefore, measures are needed that are suitable for the evaluation of the effects of interventions for sensory disabilities, such as the fitting of hearing aids, on generic quality of life.

Interpreting parental proxy reports of (health-related) quality of life for children with unilateral cochlear implants

“…As the EQ-5D was not able to discriminate between factors that others [36,37] have previously shown to be associated with improved performance post-implantation, this suggests that the EQ-5D may not detect the full benefits of cochlear implantation. This concurs with other studies which have found that the EQ-5D estimates there to be no significant difference between HRQL before and after hearing aid provision [40][41][42], suggesting that the EQ-5D is not well aligned to detect the changes that occur from hearing interventions.…”

“…The VAS (referred to as EuroQol VAS) was adapted in order to request information about the child's current health state (as assessed by their parent), and scores, which were requested on a 0-100 scale, were divided by 100 in order for them to be comparable with other measures used in this study, and elsewhere [37,[40][41][42][43][44][45]. As well as asking parents to rate their child's current health state on the EuroQol VAS parents were also asked to estimate (retrospectively) what their child's health state would have been, according to the EuroQol VAS, pre-implantation.…”

A comparison of the quality of life of hearing-impaired people as estimated by three different utility measures Un comparación de la calidad de vida de personas con trastornos auditivos estimada por tres diferentes medidas de utilidad

“…There is, therefore, the potential for one HRQL questionnaire to suggest an audiological intervention to be relatively effective, and for another to suggest the same intervention to be ineffective. Indeed the evaluation of hearing aid fitting has often found that aids improve a person's hearing, but that no significant improvements are shown on generic measures of HRQL (Bess, 2000;Joore et al, 2003a;Joore et al, 2003b). Bess (2000) concluded that ''Although we have good reason to believe that hearing aids improve quality of life, available functional health status measures lack the appropriate sensitivity to be used for assessing the benefit of amplification in individuals with hearing impairment.…”

“…Such a finding is borne out by the few papers that have assessed this. Improvements in hearing have been shown to be associated with significant gains on the Health Utilities Index (Palmer et al, 1999;Krabbe et al, 2000;Cheng et al, 2000) but not the EQ-5D (Joore et al, 2002;Joore et al, 2003a;Joore et al, 2003b) and other generic measures which focus on performance (Bess, 2000).…”

The Cost-Effectiveness of Different Hearing Screening Strategies for 50- to 70-Year-Old Adults: A Markov Model

“…Hearing aid fitting can increase the quality of life of people with a hearing loss [4][5][6]. It is a costeffective intervention (compared with no rehabilitation) [7,8]. Nevertheless, adults generally postpone seeking help until 5 to 10 years after the onset of their hearing loss [9][10][11].…”