van den Berg Bernard, Gafni Amiram, Portrait France
Faculty of Economic & Business, University of Groningen, The Netherlands.
Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis and Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McMaster University, Canada.
Soc Sci Med. 2017 Apr;179:182-190. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.02.025. Epub 2017 Feb 20.
It is hard to ignore the importance of patient time investment in the production of health since the influential paper by Grossman (1972). Patients' time includes time to admission, travel time, waiting time, and treatment time and can be substantial. Patients' time is, however, often ignored in economic analyses. This may lead to biased results and inappropriate policy recommendations, which may eventually influence patients' health, wellbeing and welfare. How to value patient time is not straightforward. Although there is some emerging literature on the monetary valuation of patient time, an important challenge remains to develop an approach that can be used to monetarily value time of patients not participating in the labour market. We aim to contribute to the health economics literature by describing and empirically illustrating how to monetarily value the time of patients not participating in the labour market comprehensively, using the contingent valuation method. It is worth noting that our method can also be applied to people participating in the labour market. This paper describes the development of the contingent valuation survey. We apply our survey approach to a sample of 238 Dutch patients not participating in the labour market: n = 107 Radiotherapy department (data collected between November 2011 and January 2013); n = 44 Rehabilitation department (March 2012-May 2012); n = 87 Orthopaedics department (January to June 2013). Results show that those patients value waiting time the highest (€30.10 per hour) and value travel and treatment time equally with respectively €13.20 and €13.32 per hour. This paper encourages future empirical research refining and applying the developed survey methodology to create more data on how other subgroups of individuals value their patients' time.
自格罗斯曼（1972年）发表具有影响力的论文以来，很难忽视患者投入时间对健康产出的重要性。患者的时间包括入院时间、出行时间、等待时间和治疗时间，这些时间可能相当可观。然而，在经济分析中，患者的时间常常被忽视。这可能导致结果有偏差以及政策建议不恰当，最终可能影响患者的健康、幸福和福利。如何衡量患者的时间并非易事。尽管有一些关于患者时间货币估值的新文献，但开发一种可用于对未参与劳动力市场的患者时间进行货币估值的方法仍是一项重大挑战。我们旨在通过描述并实证说明如何使用条件估值法全面地对未参与劳动力市场的患者时间进行货币估值，为健康经济学文献做出贡献。值得注意的是，我们的方法也可应用于参与劳动力市场的人群。本文描述了条件估值调查的开展情况。我们将调查方法应用于238名未参与劳动力市场的荷兰患者样本：n = 107名来自放疗科（2011年11月至2013年1月收集的数据）；n = 44名来自康复科（2012年3月至2012年5月）；n = 87名来自骨科（2013年1月至6月）。结果显示，这些患者对等待时间的估值最高（每小时30.10欧元），对出行时间和治疗时间估值相同，分别为每小时13.20欧元和13.32欧元。本文鼓励未来开展实证研究，完善并应用已开发的调查方法，以获取更多关于其他个体亚组如何衡量其患者时间的数据。
