Developing a preference-based method for mapping between (preference-based) measures of health and quality of life

NHS必须就如何使用其有限的资源做出重要决定。其中一个方法是比较不同保健服务的资金价值。帮助做出这一决定的一种方法（尽管还有其他因素会影响这一决定）是比较服务的成本和效益，这些成本和效益是以健康为衡量标准的;这是通过计算它们的人均成本来实现的。质量调整生命年（QALY）？并选择每个QALY成本最低的干预措施。Q值是通过给一个人一个从0到1的值来计算的？的健康状态（其中1表示完全健康，0表示被视为死亡的状态），然后乘以其持续时间。目前，有一种以上的方法为不同的健康状态分配价值，而每一个干预措施的质量调整生命年的成本计算可能会受到使用哪种方法的影响。不同的研究使用不同的方法，因为没有一种测量方法可以涵盖每个护理组和医疗条件的所有感兴趣的维度。这就是该提案所解决的问题：解决目前无法比较涵盖不同疾病和不同患者群体的研究的问题。该提案旨在解决这一问题，要求公众简单地将一组健康状态（使用不同的工具描述）按排名顺序排列，从最高的最佳状态开始。该信息将用于比较使用不同仪器获得的结果。这对于研究人员结合不同研究的证据以及政策制定者使用每季度成本来帮助决策非常有用。

The NHS has to make important decisions about how to spend its limited resources. One way to do this is to compare the value for money from different health services. One method for helping to make this decision (though there will be other factors that should influence the decision) is to compare services in terms of their cost and benefits measured in terms of health; this is done by calculating their cost per ?quality adjusted life year (QALY)? and to select those interventions with the lowest cost per QALY. QALYs are calculated by giving a value from zero to one to a person?s state of health (where one is for full health and zero for states regarded as bad as being dead) and then multiplying with its duration. Currently, there is more than one method of assigning values to different health states, and the calculation of the cost per QALY of an intervention might be affected by which method is used. Different studies use different methods, because no one measure can capture all the dimensions of interest across every care group and medical condition. This is the problem the proposal addresses: to solve the current impossibility of comparing between studies that cover different diseases and different patient groups. This proposal seeks to address this problem by asking members of the general public to simply place a set health states (described using different instruments) in rank order, starting with the best imaginable state at the top. This information will be used to allow comparisons to be made between results obtained using different instruments. This will be very useful to researchers combining evidence from different studies and to policy makers using a cost per QALYs to help make decisions.