Whately-Smith Caroline, Watkins Claire, Mann Helen, Fletcher Chrissie, Ducournau Pierre
Whately-Smith Ltd, King's Langley, Hertfordshire, UK.
Pharm Stat. 2014 May-Jun;13(3):184-95. doi: 10.1002/pst.1616. Epub 2014 Apr 2.
This paper provides an introduction to utilities for statisticians working mainly in clinical research who have not had experience of health technology assessment work. Utility is the numeric valuation applied to a health state based on the preference of being in that state relative to perfect health. Utilities are often combined with survival data in health economic modelling to obtain quality-adjusted life years. There are several methods available for deriving the preference weights and the health states to which they are applied, and combining them to estimate utilities, and the clinical statistician has valuable skills that can be applied in ensuring the robustness of the trial design, data collection and analyses to obtain and handle this data. In addition to raising awareness of the subject and providing source references, the paper outlines the concepts and approaches around utilities using examples, discusses some of the key issues, and proposes areas where statisticians can collaborate with health economic colleagues to improve the quality of this important element of health technology assessment.
本文主要面向主要从事临床研究但没有卫生技术评估工作经验的统计学家，介绍相关实用工具。效用是基于处于某种健康状态相对于完美健康状态的偏好而应用于该健康状态的数值评估。在健康经济建模中，效用通常与生存数据相结合以获得质量调整生命年。有多种方法可用于得出偏好权重及其所应用的健康状态，并将它们结合起来估算效用，临床统计学家拥有宝贵的技能，可用于确保试验设计、数据收集和分析的稳健性，以获取和处理这些数据。除了提高对该主题的认识并提供资料来源参考文献外，本文还通过示例概述了围绕效用的概念和方法，讨论了一些关键问题，并提出了统计学家可以与卫生经济领域的同事合作以提高卫生技术评估这一重要要素质量的领域。
