A platform for targeting cost-utility analyses to specific populations

Abstract

Quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) are a popular measure employed in cost-utility analysis (CUA) for informing decisions about competing healthcare programs applicable to a target population. CUA is often performed using decision trees (DTs), i.e. probabilistic models that allow calculating the outcome related to different decision options (e.g., two different therapeutic strategies) considering all their expected effects. DTs may in fact include a measure of the quality of life, namely a utility coefficient (UC), for every health state patients might experience as a result of the healthcare interventions. Eliciting reliable UCs from patients poses several challenges, and it is not a common procedure in clinical practice. We recently developed UceWeb, a tool that supports users in that elicitation process. In this paper we describe the public repository where UceWeb collects the elicited UCs, and how this repository can be exploited by researchers interested in performing DT-based CUAs on a specific population. To this aim, we also describe the UceWeb integration with a commercial software for DTs management, which allows to automatically run the models quantified with the mean value of the target population UCs.