Valuing the Q in QALYs

Quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) are used to measure the health benefits associated with treatments. QALYs are derived from objective mortality data weighted by assessments made by the general population of the impact on health-related quality of life associated with particular health states. In this study, a simple change is introduced to improve the validity of QALYs by giving raters information about how people living in the health states rate the health states. Murphy, R. P., Boyce, C. J., Dolan, P., & Wood, A. M. (2020). Valuing the Q in QALYs: Does providing patients’ ratings affect population values? Health Psychology, 39, 37–45.doi:10.1037/hea0000806. You can read the full paper here.