Health Research Case Study-
Understanding Preferences for Cancer-Specific Health-Related Quality of Life
The Problem
Health-related quality of life (HRQoL) serves as a measure of an individual’s overall well-being concerning their health status. While clinical decision makers utilize these measures directly to monitor patients’ well-being, health economics decision makers require slightly different information. Ultimately, what they need to know is people’s preferences toward specific outcomes or health statuses. For example, how much do individuals value increased social functioning? How would they trade off between greater longevity and functional/symptom decline? Knowledge of a population’s average preferences empowers decision makers to construct health system budgets that align with people’s actual values.
Step One: Validating a Cancer-Specific HRQoL Measure
A cross-disciplinary consortium engaged SurveyEngine to support the validation of a cancer-specific HRQoL measure known as the QLU-C10D. We first managed qualitative and quantitative studies aimed at assessing the feasibility of employing a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) as a valuation study for the QLU-C10D. This included programming the surveys, recruiting participants, overseeing qualitative interviews, and managing dataflow and cleaning. The flexibility of the SurveyEngine platform allowed these studies to achieve multiple measure-development goals, including a comparison of two presentation formats. Next, we programmed and managed studies to assess other properties of the measure, namely individual choice consistency and utility estimate consistency, using a test-retest study design. Finally, we managed a study to verify the feasibility of having cancer patients complete a QLU-C10D DCE valuation study. We utilized our expertise in recruiting challenging patient populations and ensuring regulatory compliance to ensure the success of this valuable study.
Step Two: Delivering Country-Specific Value Sets
Beyond tool validation, our collaboration extended to establishing country-specific value sets for over 13 countries. These value sets provide the foundation for informed decision making tailored to specific cultural contexts. In the course of these studies, we leaned on our extensive experience collecting and quality-checking data to deliver datasets representative of each country’s population. Through our detailed project oversight, we maintained methodological consistency across borders, ensuring the reliability and comparability of our findings.
References
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