Developing a method for estimating the impact of health policy interventions in terms of QALYs

Abstract: Routine administrative data is often the only available source by which to evaluate the impact of large national health policies. Constrained by the information available in such routine data, evaluations commonly estimate the impact of policy interventions on mortality rates. Whilst an important indicator of a policy’s success, this does not facilitate an assessment of cost-effectiveness.

This seminar will present a method to estimate the impact of health policy interventions on QALYs indirectly using administrative data. We develop a discounted and quality-adjusted life expectancy (DANQALE) tariff, combining health-related quality of life data from a general population sample with life expectancy from life tables. Local polynomial smoothing was used to model the average utility score for an individual with a given health condition at each single year of age, stratified by gender.

We present this DANQALE tariff for cohorts of individuals with health conditions that map to ICD-10 chapters and programme budgeting categories. To perform an evaluation, this DANQALE tariff can then be attached to all patient admission records, and used to translate econometric analyses of mortality into broader estimates of the impact of policy interventions in terms of QALYs.